


ELLA® 

BY EVA MARCH TAPPAN 

























































































































ELLA 

A Little Schoolgirl of the Sixties 



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ELLA 










E L L A 

A Little Schoolgirl of the Sixties 

A Book for Children and for 
Grown-Ups who Remember 

BY 

EVA MARCH TAPPAN 

n 

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY 

RUTH J. BEST 



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BOSTON AND NEW YORK 


HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 
fcfje a&tbembe Cambtfose 
1923 














COPYRIGHT, 1923. BY EVA MARCH TAPP AN 
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 






©C1A760911 

tKfje jRibewfbt $re*« 

CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS 
PRINTED IN THE U.S.A. 


NOV 15 *23 



1A0 j 


“ BOY COUSIN ” AND THE DAYS ON 
THE BEARCAMP 








CONTENTS 


I. A Little Girl and a Big Seminary 

II. A Young Lady of the English and Classi¬ 
cal Graduating Course 

III. The Three Tragedies of Ella’s Seminary 
Life 

IV. Graduation Day and its Misfortunes 

V. On the Way to Grandmother’s 

VI. The Real New Hampshire 

VII. Boy Cousin 

VIII. Rainy Days and Sundays 

IX. Books and Play 

X. Like Other Girls 

XI. Ella’s First Day in the Public School 

XII. “Foosle” Remains 

XIII. The “Tories’ Alphabet” 

XIV. Among the “Well-behaved Angels” 

XV. Ella and the Principal 

XVI. When the Committee Men Came 

XVII. The High School Examinations 

Appendix: The Examination Questions of 

1869 


1 

11 

19 

30 

40 

51 

61 

71 

80 

94 

103 

111 

120 

131 

142 

151 

160 

171 



ELLA 

• • 

CHAPTER I 

A LITTLE GIRL AND A BIG SEMINARY 

The nicest thing that ever happened to a little girl 
eight years old was going to happen to Ella, and she 
was so delighted that she could hardly sit still in the 
big clumsy stage-coach that rolled and shook and 
swung slowly away from the city. Uphill and down¬ 
hill it went, past ponds and meadows and brooks and 
woods, and little new houses and big old homesteads 
shaded by ancient elms or maples. Every roll of the 
wheels brought the little passenger nearer to perfect 
happiness. 

Ella was going to live in a seminary, and surely 
nothing could be more charming than that. She knew 
all about seminaries, for she had visited one when she 
was little — at least two years before. The girls had 
petted her and given her candy; the principal had 
presented her with a story-book. Best of all, she had 
slept in an old-fashioned bed with a canopy, such a 
bed as she had never seen anywhere else. What could 
be more delightful! And now she was going to have 
every day such pleasures as these, and no one knew 
how much more marvelous ones. 


2 


ELLA 


By and by the stage came to a scattered village 
with a church or two, a schoolhouse, and a post-office. 
After the mail had been left, the driver turned up a 
long avenue with fields and a line of trees on either 
hand. At the head of the avenue was a circle of tall 
fir trees, and back of the circle was a large white build¬ 
ing with a wing at each end, a narrow piazza in front, 
and tall fluted columns rising from its floor to the top 
of the second story. 

The driver called “ Whoa! ” A tall man came from 
somewhere and shook hands with Ella’s mother and 
with herself. Then he led the way upstairs to some 
bare, almost unfurnished rooms. The mother was to 
use the furniture from her old home, and it had not 

i 

yet arrived. After a little talk, they all went down 
some dark and winding stairs to the dining-room, a 
large, low, gloomy basement room with two long 
tables. The end of one of them was “set,” and there 
Ella and her mother and the tall man and two or 
three other grown-ups ate supper. 

A little later Ella and her mother went up to the 
almost unfurnished rooms. Ella stood looking through 
the open door down the lonely corridor. There were 
no nice girls about; there was no canopy to the bed; 
there were no story-books; there was no one to talk to 
her. Everybody was grown up; there were no chil¬ 
dren. There were no city lights, and the twilight 
seemed to be shutting down faster than it ever did 
before. 


A LITTLE GIRL AND A BIG SEMINARY 3 


Oh, this doesn’t seem one bit, not one single bit, 
like a seminary,” Ella cried. 

The mother gathered her into her lap, and there the 
little girl sobbed away her loneliness and disappoint¬ 
ment, and forgot it all in sleep. But the mother sat 
beside the window, looking out into the darkness and 
the past; for it was here that she and the father had 
first met, in the old joyful student days; and now he 
was gone, and she had come back, alone, to teach 
students who were, as she had then been, at the happy 
beginnings. 

When the morning came, things were better, Ella 
thought. The sun shone, and people began to gather. 
The first arrivals were teachers and boy and girl stu¬ 
dents. Then came students of earlier days, for the 
seminary had been closed for some years and was now 
to be reopened. There were people from the village 
and the neighboring country, and a little later, when 
the stage from the city drove up, there were a number 
of dignified middle-aged men with long beards. These 
men were to make speeches. 

The mother was helping to welcome the guests, and 
Ella wandered around alone. Before long she met a 
boy a little smaller than herself. The two children 
looked at each other. 

“What’s your name?” the boy asked. 

“Ella. What’s yours?” 

“John. My father’s the principal. What did you 
have Christmas?” 


4 


ELLA 


“I had a doll and a bedstead for her and a book of 
fairy stories,” the little girl replied. “What did you 
have?” 

“I had a sled and a rubber ball and some red 
mittens.” 

“I had a sled three Christmases ago, when I was 
little,” said Ella. “Its name is Thomas Jefferson. 
How old are you?” 

“Six. But I’m going on seven,” he added quickly. 

Ella was eight, going on nine, and she thought that 
a boy who was only six was hardly more than a baby; 
but he was better than nobody, so they spent most of 
the day together. 

It was a full day. The hundreds of people went 
through the building; they ate a collation in the base¬ 
ment dining-room; they renewed old friendships; and 
at two o’clock they assembled in the little grove front¬ 
ing the main door to listen to the speeches. 

And speeches there were, indeed; speeches on the 
old days of the seminary and on the plans for its fu¬ 
ture; and of course there was one on “The true theory 
of education,” delivered by the man who knew least 
about that subject. The lieutenant-governor of the 
State sent a check for $100 for the library; the mayor 
of the capital of the State sent one for $250. Ticknor 
& Fields, Little & Brown, and Wendell Phillips all 
presented books. Everybody was jubilant, and sunset 
was only one hour distant when with three hearty 
cheers for the seminary the people said good-bye to 


A LITTLE GIRL AND A BIG SEMINARY 5 


one another, and all but the teachers and the students 
started for their homes. 

Ella had not heard any of the speeches, but she had 
found where early goldenrod and asters were growing; 
she had learned that there was a beautiful lake whose 
shore was a fine place to pick up pebbles and go in 
wading; and she had discovered on the hastily ar¬ 
ranged shelves of the library some books that looked 
interesting. She and John had only one grievance, 
namely, that the watermelon had given out before it 
came to their end of the table. 

The next day classes were arranged and the regular 
life of the seminary began. Ella was delighted to find 
that she was to be called a “student” just as if she 
had been grown up, and when a young man, already 
lonesome for the little sister at home, asked her to 
sit on his knee, she refused. It was of course quite 
proper for a little girl to sit on the knee of an elderly 
gentleman, as he seemed to her, but she did not 
think that one “student” ought to sit on the knee of 
another. 

Ella’s mother had her own “theory of education.” 
She thought that it was better for young children to 
be out of doors than in a schoolroom, and that, when 
they began to study, arithmetic and foreign languages 
should come first. Ella had never been to school or 
been taught at home. Somehow, she had learned to 
read, no one knew exactly how, and she had read 
every book that had come to hand if it looked at all 


6 


ELLA 


interesting. One of these books was a small arith¬ 
metic. It was quite the fashion in those days to bind 
schoolbooks in paper of a bright salmon pink. Ella 
liked the color, and the result was that she had picked 
up some familiarity with addition, subtraction, multi¬ 
plication, and division. 

The professor of mathematics was a courteous, 
scholarly young man just out of college. He said that 
it would not trouble him in the least to have in one of 
his classes a little girl in a short-sleeved, low-necked 
blue muslin dress and “ankle-ties.” Apparently the 
tall young men and young women students did not ob¬ 
ject either; and the result was that for half an hour ev¬ 
ery morning Ella made groups of straggling figures on 
the blackboard, and with the kindly teaching of “my 
professor,” as she proudly called the young instructor, 
she learned to “invert the divisor and proceed as in 
multiplication.” She learned also that a decimal point 
has an uncanny power to reduce a comfortable num¬ 
ber of dollars to mere copper cents. She even learned 
that “If a student purchased a Latin grammar for 
$0.75, a Virgil for $3.75, a Greek lexicon for $4.75, a 
Homer for $1.25, an English dictionary for $3.75, and 
a Greek Testament for $0.75,” the whole cost of his 
purchases would amount to $15. This was her favorite 
among the “Practical Problems.” The teacher never 

i 

guessed the reason, but it was because she had read a 
story about a carrier pigeon, and she was glad that 
the student had a “homer.” 


A LITTLE GIRL AND A BIG SEMINARY 7 


Ella learned that “cwt.” meant hundredweight , 
that “d” meant penny , and that a queer sign some¬ 
what like a written “L” meant pound. Why these 
things should be, she had no idea; she supposed grown 
people had just made them up. She could overlook 
even such foolishness as this, but she did draw the 
line at learning the multiplication table. It was in her 
book, and she could turn to it at any time, so why 
should she bother to learn it? The young professor 
was always charitable to a new idea. He looked at the 
child thoughtfully; maybe she was in the right. At 
any rate, he only smiled when he saw how rapidly a 
certain page in her arithmetic was wearing out. Be¬ 
fore it had quite disappeared, the multiplication 
table, even with the eights and nines, was as firmly 
fixed in the small pupil’s memory as if she had learned 
it with tears and lamentations. 

Ella spelled rather unusually well, perhaps because 
in all her eight years she had seldom seen or heard a 
word spelled incorrectly; but her handwriting was 
about as bad as it could be, especially toward the end 
of the page, where the “loops and tails” pointed as 
many ways as if they had been an explosion of fire¬ 
works. The tall principal, John’s father, taught pen¬ 
manship, and the little girl, with a copybook, a red- 
painted penholder, and a viciously sharp “Gillott, 
303,” took her place at one of the long, slanting tables 
in the hall. It was much too high for her, but no one 
was troubled about that in those days. If a table was 


8 


ELLA 


too high, it was because the child was too short, and 
that was all there was to it. 

Day after day, Ella wrote in her copybook whole 
pages of such thrilling statements as, “Be good and 
you will be happy,” and, “Honesty is the best pol¬ 
icy.” Of the truth of the first she was by no means 
convinced, for she remembered being — of necessity 
— very well behaved, indeed, when she was not at 
all happy. As to the second, she had no idea what 
“policy” was. She asked the principal very shyly 
what the sentence meant, and he said it meant that 
little boys and girls must always tell the truth. Of 
course no decent children ever told lies, thought 
Ella, with a vague indignation. She pondered over 
the reply, and at length made up her mind that the 
writing-book must have been printed for children 
that were ragged and dirty and said “ain’t got 
none.” She had to finish the page, but every line 
was worse written than the one before it. The prin¬ 
cipal looked a little grave and asked if she was sure 
that she had done her best. Ella hung her head and 
said nothing; but maybe she had done her best — 
under the circumstances. 

The principal tried his utmost to teach her to write 
the fine “Spencerian ” hand that was then so admired; 
but the wicked little “Gillott, 303,” continued to 
stick in the paper and make sprays of ink all about — 
which Ella rather admired as incipient pictures — 
and the red-painted wooden penholder still aimed at 


A LITTLE GIRL AND A BIG SEMINARY 9 

whatever point of the compass happened to suit the 
comfort of the little cramped fingers. “Where should 
the pen point?” the principal would patiently ask; 
and with equal patience the pupil would reply, “Over 
the right shoulder.” It would turn into place obedi¬ 
ently, but long before the teacher had reached the 
other end of the long table, it was again pointing out 
the north window toward the lake or out the south 
window to the hill and the rocks. And why not? Where 
the thoughts were, surely the pen might point also. 

Ella felt as if she was quite a busy little girl, for be¬ 
sides her lessons in arithmetic and penmanship, there 
was half an hour of French every day. It was good 
strong old-fashioned French, too, learned by main 
force from a grammar. She recited patiently, “Ah, 
bay, say, day,” etc., as she was taught; but in her 
heart of hearts she thought it utter foolishness to spoil 
perfectly good English letters by giving them such 
names. She learned that there were such things as 
nasal sounds, objected to in English, but highly es¬ 
teemed in French; and she learned to translate into 
the French language and pronounce — with an accent 
that would have thrown the politest Frenchman into 
a state of collapse — such interesting dialogue as, 
“Have you the girl’s glove?” “No, sir, but I have 
the cook’s hat”; and such bits of tragedy as, “My 
brother’s tailor has broken my slate,” or — most 
touching of all — “I liked the little girl, but she did 
not like me.” ' 


10 


ELLA 


French, even grammar French, carried Ella into a 
new world. She concluded that to harmonize with its 
caprices she ought to take a French name when, so to 
speak, she entered France by way of Fasquelle’s 
Grammar and the French recitation room. Some¬ 
where she had heard the word “elephantine,” and she 
had read, in English, about Fantine and Cosette. She 
concluded that this fine-sounding word — only she 
would spell it “Elefantine” and put on plenty of ac¬ 
cents, circumflexes, because she thought acutes and 
graves had an unfinished look — would accord nicely 
with her own name and would also be a compliment 
to the French, especially if it was pronounced with a 
good strong nasal sound in the middle of the word. 

She was rather too shy to ask the French teacher to 
call her “Elefantine,” but she wrote the name in her 
Fasquelle, and had fine times saying it over to herself 
when she was alone. One day the mother happened to 
take up the book, and she showed Ella in the diction¬ 
ary what the word meant. All the poetry went out 
of it then, for Ella always bowed to the authority of 
the big dictionary; and she promptly rubbed out the 
new name, accents and all. 


CHAPTER II 

A LADY OF THE ENGLISH AND CLASSICAL 
GRADUATING COURSE 

A second volume which Ella carried proudly under 
her arm when she went to the French class was called 
“Le Grandpere.” It was written expressly for the 
use of schools — so said the title-page. It was 
“Approuve par le Conseil Royal de Flnstruction pu- 
blique.” If further proof was needed of its value, 
the fact that it was “Carefully prepared for Amer¬ 
ican schools ” was surely sufficient. How could any¬ 
thing be better for a child to translate? 

“Le Grandpere” began, with unpardonable guile, 
quite like a story: “The old Captain Granville in¬ 
habited a pretty village situated on the shore of the 
Loire,” as Ella slowly translated it. But her sus¬ 
picions were soon aroused, for, looking ahead a few 
lines, she found something about “charging himself 
with overseeing their first education.” That did not 
sound promising, though it was possible that the four 
grandsons who were being educated might do interest¬ 
ing things bet ween times. As she read further, she 
found that the grandfather educated them by taking 
them to walk every Sunday and giving them in¬ 
structive lectures. Now in Ella’s experience nice 
children did not study their lessons on Sunday, neither 


12 


ELLA 


did they go to walk. It is true that occasionally, after 
they had been to church and Sunday school, had eaten 
the cold Sunday dinner, and had read their Sunday- 
school books through, they were allowed to take a 
quiet, almost awesome walk up and down the paths 
of the nearest cemetery and talk about the flowers or 
their books; but this was quite different from an 
everyday stroll off into the country. 

The four boys and their “Grandpere,” however, 
wandered off shamelessly every Sunday — in the 
forenoon, too, when by all the customs of Ella’s Sun¬ 
day mornings they should have been at church. It 
was true that occasionally their grandfather gave 
them a moral lecture on a Sunday morning, but these 
lectures were often a puzzle to Ella’s eight-year-old 
theology. For instance, she had, of course, been taught 
to do what she knew was right, but she was quite at 
sea when “Jules” confessed that he had struck his 
brother, and declared, “laying his hand upon his 
heart,” that “something here” told him he had done 
wrong. Ella laid her hand over the place where she 
supposed her heart to lie, but nothing made any re¬ 
marks to her. She concluded that it was because she 
was not quite bad enough just then, and she made up 
her mind that — although of course she would not do 
anything wrong on purpose — yet the next time that 
she was naughty, she would watch carefully to see if 
she heard any conversation in the vicinity of her 
heart. 


A LADY OP THE GRADUATING COURSE 13 


* 

It was somewhat of a pity that Ella’s lessons made 
so little impression upon the bulk of “Le Grandpere,” 
for it was quite an amazing book, and to know it 
would have been a widely distended, if not a liberal 
education. It began, indeed, so simply that Ella was 
disgusted, for these boys, old enough to live in a 
seminary like herself, actually were amazed when 
they saw the sun, and appealed to their grandfather to 
tell them what it was. Ella did not appreciate the 
exigencies of authorship or realize that there must be 
something on which to hang a small lecture about the 
heavenly bodies. 

Further on there were discourses on the five senses, 
on how to count, on the history of the French sover¬ 
eigns; and then the chapters gradually worked on 
through slavery, avarice, extravagance, the massacre 
of Saint Bartholomew’s Day, vaccination, and lep¬ 
rosy. What could have been better for a child? Any 
deficiencies that in later times manifested themselves 
in Ella’s education may be fairly ascribed to her never 
having completed the translation of this profound 
volume. 

In Ella’s study of French, there was one thing that 
puzzled her greatly. She was willing to believe that 
French people understood French, but that they ever 
really knew it as she knew English without studying 
Fasquelle and “Le Grandpere” was something that 
she could hardly accept as truth. Then, too, the 
mother had told her that she had had a great-great- 


14 


ELLA 


grandfather who was a Frenchman; and she often 
wondered whether, if she had lived in his day, they 
would have been able to talk together. She could have 
said, “Have you the knife of the brother of the car- 
pen ter?” but unless he made the proper reply, “No, 
but I have the pencil of the sister of the dressmaker,” 
she would not have known what to say next. She 
could never have said, “ Great-great-grandfather, will 
you take me to ride this afternoon?” because that 
was not in Fasquelle. 

She wondered if the French people really talked 
French every day, or only when they had company. 
After long deliberation, she came to the conclusion 
that they probably talked French all the time, but that 
of course they thought in English. These were the 
grown-ups. As for the children, no one could expect 
them to talk French, certainly not when they were 
playing. She wished she had one of them to play with. 
It would be almost like meeting her great-great¬ 
grandfather as a little boy. 

Of course Ella “practiced.” In the sixties, boys 
“took lessons” only if they showed some talent for 
music, but girls were expected, talent or no talent, to 
spend in solitary confinement two hours a day at hard 
labor on the piano. In Ella’s case, the two hours were 
lessened to one by her mother’s decree, and “solitary 
confinement” was not added to the hard labor, be¬ 
cause, when the sad moment had arrived, a genial 
“Bow-wow!” was always heard and a big black 


A LADY OF THE GRADUATING COURSE 15 


shaggy head, followed by the rest of a great New¬ 
foundland dog, pushed open the door. If it chanced 
to be the day for Ella’s lesson, Ponto waved a friendly 
apology to the teacher and withdrew; but on other 
days he stretched himself out under the piano, and 
with a sigh of toleration proceeded to sleep away the 
time until the hour was up. He never failed to hear 
the first stroke of the bell, and if Ella did not stop on 
the instant, he slipped his great muzzle under her 
wrists and lifted them up from the keys. 

Ella, like most children, had a healthy dislike of 
practicing. It was such an unmanageable interference 
w T ith her plans. “You like French and you like arith¬ 
metic,” said her puzzled teacher; “ why is it that 
you do not like music?” 

Ella pondered a minute, then she said: “It’s be¬ 
cause there isn’t any way to get the better of it. If I 
have arithmetic to do, I can work hard and then I can 
say, ‘ There, you old thing, I’ve done you in half the 
time you wanted me to spend, and now Ponto and I 
are going to the lake in spite of you.’ But no matter 
how hard I practice, an hour is always an hour, and 
there isn’t any way to make it shorter.” 

Of course Ella hated to count. Bribes were offered. 
“My music teacher said that if I would count three 
weeks without stopping, she would give me a piece,” 
Ella wrote in her little diary. In spite of the promised 
“piece,” however, “One, two, three, four,” became 
as tiresome as the multiplication table, and at length 


16 


ELLA 


she invented a way to make the time pass; she played 
very loud with one hand and at the same time patted 
Ponto with the other. 

She felt a little guilty when her music teacher said: 
“I heard you practicing two or three measures over 
and over this morning, Ella, and I thought what a 
good lesson you were going to have to-morrow.” 

Ella did not reply, and she forgot to listen to see 
whether her heart would make any speeches to her. 
She didn’t like practicing, and she didn’t, and when 
she heard of remarkable little girls no older than she 
who had taken only twelve lessons and could play 
“two pieces” already, she did not care very much 
that she could play only one. Neither did Ponto. 

Ella had a reason for not caring. She firmly ex¬ 
pected that some day, even without that wearisome 
“One, two, three, four,” she would play as well as the 
little girl with two pieces, perhaps even as well as her 
teacher. It was all very simple and very logical. The 
teacher wore a ring with a bright red stone in it and 
was able to play; by and by she would have a ring 
with a bright red stone, and then of course she would 
be able to play. Ella knew that the grown-ups 
would laugh at her if she told them her fancy, so she 
only whispered it into Ponto’s ear. Dogs could 
understand, but grown-ups could not. 

Like most children, Ella was younger than her 
years in some ways and older in others. She could 
cherish a belief in the efficacy of a ring to give her 
musical ability, and she could sit in a class with 


A LADY OF THE GRADUATING COURSE 17 


“ladies and gentlemen” more than twice her age 
without a thought of this being anything remarkable. 
Of course she knew that the children in the village 
went to school with boys and girls of their own years; 
but this was nothing; they did one thing and she did 
another, that was all. She even took it as a matter of 
course when in the “Institute Reporter,” the little 
four-page sheet that glorified the seminary with 
printers’ ink, she saw her own name among the 
other “ladies.” It had, too, a special mark of honor 
in the shape of an asterisk indicating that she was 
“In studies of the English and Classical graduating 
course.” To be sure, no one of her studies was clas¬ 
sical, and she was many years removed from gradua¬ 
tion, but it made one more name on the list. 

As to the English, she really wrote with some degree 
of correctness because she had never seen writings 
that were incorrect, and she was quite aghast when 
she first heard the correction of compositions in class. 
She wrote to her uncle, “I can’t stop for dates. I want 
to tell you what funny compositions some of the 
scholars write. One great boy wrote his and com¬ 
menced every word with a capital letter. I have not 
quite got to doing that.” Ella thoroughly enjoyed 
making tiny blankbooks and composing equally tiny 
stories carefully adjusted to the little pages. She even 
manufactured a paper for children, composing, edit¬ 
ing, and copying it all herself. 

Every Monday evening the “Lyceum” was held, 
an exercise which was expected to develop the literary 


18 


ELLA 


ability of the students. Ella had joined it as a matter 
of course, and when called on for a recitation, she had 
given “Over the River” in her best style. When the 
second call came, she decided, possibly with a latent 
instinct for advertising, to read the first number of her 
paper. This was not exactly an innovation, for the 
“Lyceum” already rejoiced in a paper called “The 
Alpha.” 

Ella’s paper was named “Little Pearls.” How the 
“ladies and gentlemen” and the august faculty kept 
their faces straight during its presentation is a mys¬ 
tery. It contained a few conundrums, whose answers 
were promised “in our next,” but otherwise it was 
carefully modeled on the weekly paper of the Sunday 
school. There were letters from children with the 
patronizing comments of the editor; there was an 
original story or two; and the sheet ended with the 
tragic tale, drawn from the little editor’s own ex¬ 
perience, of a tiny fish, caught and brought home 
from the lake. I fear that the writer had never been 
properly trained in “nature study,” for she stated 
that the fish jumped out of the water and was found 
“lying upon its back,” dead, and she declared, 
“although a cat has nine lives, a fish has only one, 
and therefore it always stayed dead forever after.” 
Whether this literary production lengthened the list 
of subscribers, no one can say; but certainly Ella’s 
minute cash account showed no marked increase of 
income on that date. 


CHAPTER III 

THE THREE TRAGEDIES OF ELLA’S SEMINARY 

LIFE 

At the seminary there were only three children be¬ 
sides Ella. One was two-year-old Nellie, the steward’s 
daughter, whom she loved with all her heart. The 
second was John, and the third was his little sister, 
two years younger than he. For this little sister 
there was rarely any real place in Ella’s world; she 
was too young for a companion and too old for 
a baby; but just as Ned, the steward’s son, fifteen 
years old, would sometimes allow Ella, “going on 
nine,” to share his amusements, so Ella would oc¬ 
casionally permit John, “going on seven,” to go to 
the lake with her to skip stones, or to the hills for 
wild flowers. 

The village children all went to the village school, 
and Ella seldom saw any of them. The mother had 
once known the mother of Dora, daughter of the vil¬ 
lage doctor, and it was arranged that the two children 
should spend an afternoon together. No one ever 
found out exactly what happened, but after this day, 
whenever the two little girls passed, they held their 
heads very high and swung their short skirts disdain¬ 
fully, and looked away from each other. 

Soon after this visit, it came to pass that Ella 


20 


ELLA 


needed to have a tooth out to make way for a new¬ 
comer. “I dare you to go to the doctor and have it 
pulled,” said Ned mischievously. Ella would have 
felt humiliated not to “take a dare,” and she ap¬ 
pealed to the mother for permission. The mother was 
glad to escape the string-and-pull process, and she 
hoped that if the children met again, they might be¬ 
come better friends. 

“Was Dora there?” she asked on Ella’s return. 

“Yes, she was,” replied Ella with emphasis. “Her 
father told her to go out, but she just stayed in the 
room every minute. She wanted to hear me cry, but 
I wouldn’t. When it was out, she said, just as if she 
was glad, ‘Hm! Hurt you some, didn’t it?’ and I 
laughed and said, ‘No, not a bit.’” Ella did not add 
the fact that going down the doctor’s walk, she had 
swung her skirts with more disdain than ever. 

The mother looked amused. 

“Are you sure that that speech was quite true?” 
she asked. 

“Why, you see, if Dora had not been there, it would 
have hurt, of course; but she was there, and so it 
didn’t; and anyhow, I wasn’t thinking about it, so I 
shouldn’t have known it if it had.” And the mother 
was wise enough not to press the question any further. 

As has been seen, Ella would have been quite alone 
in most of her plays had it not been for Ponto. For¬ 
tunately, a dog is never too old or too young to be a 
good friend. People sometimes laugh at a little girl’s 



THEY HELD THEIR HEADS VERY HIGH AND SWUNG 
THEIR SHORT SKIRTS DISDAINFULLY, AND LOOKED 
AWAY FROM EACH OTHER 















V 






TRAGEDIES OF SEMINARY LIFE 


21 


queer notions, but a dog never makes fun of them; he 
always understands. Every morning Ponto came up¬ 
stairs, thumped on Ella’s door, and waited patiently 
till she was ready to go down with him. He was not 
allowed in recitation rooms, but everywhere else that 
she went, he followed. She greatly enjoyed visiting 
the laboratory when her professor was at work. 
Ponto would then lie down just outside the door and 
take a one-eyed nap, wondering sleepily why she 
stayed there instead of coming out of doors. 

If the kind professor was at all disturbed by her 
presence and her occasional interruptions, he never 
let her know it, but answered every question with the 
courteous attention that children love, as if their 
questions were really worth while. The crowning 
glory of her visits came, however, one day when, after 
she had asked him something that never would have 
occurred to any one but a child, he looked at her 
thoughtfully and said, “I don’t know, but I will try 
to find out.” This was indeed an honor. The pro¬ 
fessor had treated her as if she was a grown-up lady, 
and he had met her little query with as much respect 
as if the principal himself had asked it. When she 
said, “Good-bye. I have an errand in the village,” 
and followed the jubilant Ponto down stairs, she held 
her small head at least one inch higher than usual. 

The errand was closely connected with a big copper 
cent which she had held in her hand during her pursuit 
of scientific information. Indeed, she had kept close 


ELLA 


22 

watch of it ever since it came into her possession, for 
pennies did not come her way every morning. The 
grocer kept cassia buds, and these to the little cus¬ 
tomer were a luxury far transcending peppermints or 
sticks of white candy striped with red, or even choc¬ 
olate sticks, which were just coming into fashion. 

There were two grocers in the same store. One had 
white hair and the other had brown. Ella had tested 
them both and had found out that the white-haired 
one gave her more cassia buds for a cent than did the 
brown-haired one; therefore she waited patiently until 
the white-haired one appeared. Then she went back 
to the seminary joyfully. She was sure that the gen¬ 
erous dealer had given her more than ever before, and 
she would not eat one until she had shown them to 
the mother. But alas for the best-laid plans of little 
girls as well as mice and men, for when she reached 
the seminary, there was not a bud to be seen. 
Through a wicked little hole in the pocket every one 
had escaped. 

This was one of the three tragedies in Ella’s life at 
the seminary. The others were even more crushing. 
Next to her big doll, her greatest treasure was a paint¬ 
box. She had had paint-boxes before, but this was 
the largest and finest she had ever owned. She had 
taken the greatest pains to keep it clean, and it was 
as fresh and white as when she first unwrapped it. 
If the mother had seen, she would have rescued it, 
but all her attention was given to a caller; and mean- 


TRAGEDIES OF SEMIN AH Y LIFE 


23 


while his little boy, who had by no means the kind of 
soul that scorns a blot, daubed the fair white wood of 
the outside of the box with every hue that could be 
found within it. 

Ella had been out with Ponto, and when she came 
in and saw her beloved paint-box in ruins, her grief 
was literally too deep for words. The mother had 
taken her callers to see the library, and Ella caught 
up the ruined treasure and slipped out of doors to 
Ponto. She told him all about it; then the two went 
to a quiet little place where wild roses grew. With 
much difficulty she dug a hole. Therein she laid the 
precious paint-box, and with it all the hopes of the 
pictures she was going to paint for the uncle in An¬ 
dover and the grandmother in the mountains. 

The next day, the mother asked, “Where can your 
paint-box be? Have you seen it this morning?” 

Ella felt rather guilty, but she answered, “No,” 
and it was many years before the mother learned the 
solution of the mystery. 

The third tragedy came from Ella’s ambition to 
wear a linen collar. The grown-up girls in school wore 
them, and she did so long to have just one. The 
mother did not approve; she thought a tiny ruffle for 
every day and a bit of lace for best were the only neck¬ 
wear proper for a child of eight. Fate, however, prom¬ 
ised to be kind. Ella had acquired some skill in the 
making of “perforated paper” bookmarks in the 
shape of a cross, elaborately cut out in an openwork 


24 


ELLA 


pattern; and one Sunday after church a lady in the 
village, who knew her wishes, promised her a real 
collar of smooth, stiff linen in exchange for one of 
these crosses. 

Ella was wildly happy, and she wanted to begin the 
cross at once; but it was Sunday. Somehow she had 
evolved the notion that while it was wrong to play 
games on Sunday, it was not wrong to read or write 
or, indeed, to do whatever she chose with books or 
paper. Perforated paper seemed, however, a little dif¬ 
ferent. She appealed to the mother, but the mother 
often left things for the small girl to think out for her¬ 
self, and this was one of them. 

“Some people would say it was right, and some 
would say it was wrong/’ she replied. “Suppose you 
decide for yourself, and do what you think is right.” 

The little girl decided not to begin the work until 
Monday. Surely, she deserved a better reward than 
she received, for when the cross was done, the lady 
handed her a little flat package done up in white paper 
and tied with blue ribbon. 

“My sister told me,” she said with a pleasant smile, 
“that a linen collar was not at all the thing for a little 
girl of eight, and that she was sure you would like 
something else better, so I got you this instead.” 

Ella took the package with forebodings, which were 
justified, for in it was a little white handkerchief. Now 
handkerchiefs were things to lose and to have more of; 
but a linen collar was a vision, an aspiration, a heart’s 



WITH MUCH DIFFICULTY SHE DUG A HOLE 

















TRAGEDIES OF SEMINARY LIFE 


25 


desire. Her face must have shown disappointment, 
for the lady hastened to say, “There is a blue flower 
worked in one corner.” The lady had taken away her 
beautiful dream of being grown up and had given her 
instead a handkerchief — with a blue flower in one 
corner! These were the three tragedies of Ella’s 
first experience in the trials and disappointments of 
life. 

There was, however, a little comforting postscript 
to this third tragedy. Among Ella’s accomplish¬ 
ments was the ability to embroider fairly well those 
lines of crescent moons known as scallops. She 
marked out a collar on a strip of Marseilles, and by 
means of two spools she drew a line of scallops on its 
edge. After a season of diligent sewing, she was the 
proud owner of a stiff white collar. The mother ob¬ 
jected to her wearing it in public, but she was free to 
put it on and stand before her looking-glass and 
admire it; and even this was bliss. 

Then, too, Christmas was not far away, and its 
coming would make up for many troubles. To be 
sure, it was not the custom for children to be loaded 
down with gifts as they are now, but every one was 
to have something, the principal had said so; and Ella 
could hardly wait for the day. Nevertheless, in spite 
of her impatience, she thoroughly enjoyed herself. 
She had never before been in the country in the win¬ 
ter, and now she coasted on her “Thomas Jefferson”; 
she made snow men; she slipped under the branches 


26 


ELLA 


of the pines and firs and hemlocks and shook them 
until when she came out her little blue hood was all 
powdered with snow; she brought in great armfuls of 
creeping Jenny and scarlet alder berries; she broke the 
thin ice that formed over the little brooks and de¬ 
lighted in the fairy palaces of frostwork that it had 
concealed. Best of all, however, was the time when 
the ice over a shallow pool broke into cakes, and she 
could float about on them. What the busy mother 
would have said if she had known of all these ad¬ 
ventures is a question; but Ella was well and happy, 
and before long Christmas Day came, and in the 
evening the big Christmas tree. 

Santa Claus, all a-jingle with sleighbells, climbed 
in at the window. Ella knew that he was not exactly 
a real Santa Claus, but still she felt highly honored 
when in his walk about the room he patted her on the 
head and asked “How old are you?” 

“I’ll be nine to-morrow,” she replied; and it almost 
made up for the loss of the collar to have him exclaim, 
“Nine years old! Why, I thought you were a small 
child. I shall have to go pretty deep into my pack to 
find anything for a young lady of nine.” 

By and by Santa Claus distributed the presents. 
In her ante-seminary days, Ella had felt rich if she had 
three or four gifts; but now there was a pearl-handled 
pen, a little writing-desk with a lock and key; there 
were new mittens to match the blue hood; there was a 
real jackknife, just such a one as she had been longing 




TRAGEDIES OF SEMINARY LIFE 


27 


for, big enough to cut things and not too big to go 
into her pocket; there was a box of candy and another 
of cassia buds; there was a great package of writing- 
paper, some little blankbooks, half a dozen lead 
pencils, and a little matchbox of parian marble. Just 
why any one should give a small child a matchbox 
may be questioned, but Ella did not question it. The 
grapes on the cover were pretty, and that was enough. 
There was a fine new dress of bright Scotch plaid, 
and a “jockey cap” of black velvet with trimmings of 
red and black ribbon; and pinned to the cap was a 
note from Ella’s dearest little girl friend at the old 
home, saying that she had a new cap just like this 
one. 

There was a little chinchilla muff; and that muff 
had a story. The uncle from Andover had rashly 
promised to buy whatever she liked best in all Boston. 
He had supposed that he could guide her choice to¬ 
ward the little muff; but of all the glories of Boston 
her heart had been set upon a box of tin soldiers. The 
tall uncle from Andover scoffed, pleaded, offered 
bribes, but the mite of a niece claimed her rights. 
“You promised I might have what I wanted, and I 
want the tin soldiers,” was her unchanging reply. At 
length he started in wrath to return to the study of 
theology, and the obstinate little niece called after 
him, “Good-bye, uncle; you broke your promise!” 
But she had relented sufficiently to send him a gracious 
note to the effect that a muff would really be very nice 


28 


ELLA 


to have; he had relented sufficiently to send it to her, 
and so peace had come to pass between them. 

One more present came to Ella’s share, and that 
was a thin, uninteresting envelop. But it was all 
glorious within, for here was a bright, fresh two- 
dollar bill from her professor. “To spend just as you 
like,” the card said. Fairyland had opened, for never 
before had Ella owned such an amount of money to 
spend as she liked. She had never expected to have so 
much, but she had decided long before this what she 
would buy if she should ever become a woman of 
wealth. 

The next day she and the mother talked it over. 
The mother, too, had decided what would be the best 
way to spend the money. When she was a little girl, 
money given to girls was always put into silver 
spoons, and now she held before Ella the advantages 
of putting the gift into spoons, which she could 
always keep and which would always be a remem¬ 
brance of the professor. 

“But I’d never forget him, anyway,” declared Ella, 
“and I don’t want spoons. I want something useful. 
Spoons aren’t useful. People just have them on the 
table to eat with, and then they go away and forget 
them. I want something I’d really use and like to 
use and think about using; I want a pair of skates.” 

It was against the mother’s inherited ideas of the 
desirable, and she was afraid of broken bones and thin 
ice and air holes, but the skates were bought. They 



SHE MADE SNOW MEN 





TRAGEDIES OF SEMINARY LIFE 


29 


had such a multiplicity of green straps as would 
arouse a skater of to-day to wrath; but to Ella they 
seemed the most beautiful things in the world, and 
before long she was gliding over the frozen lake in 
perfect bliss. 


CHAPTER IV 

GRADUATION DAY AND ITS MISFORTUNES 

The winter was a delight, but the spring and summer 
were even more enchanting. The seminary did not 
close until late in July, and there was time for the 
blooming of more kinds of wild flowers than the little 
city girl had ever dreamed of. It was on one of her 
fishing trips with Ned that she saw her first lady’s- 
slipper. She had left the big rock and was roaming 
about under the pines when in a dusky little hollow 
she caught sight of a stately pink flower veined with 
a darker pink. It rose from two large green leaves, 
a queen with her courtiers bowing low before her. 
There it stood, elegant, dignified, quietly at ease, al¬ 
though no other of its kind was in sight. Ella wanted 
to break it off and carry it home to show to the 
mother, but there was something in the weird grace 
of the flower that held her back. She still believed 
that there might be a fairyland, and maybe this was 
the queen of the fairies. However this might be, she 
would not break the stem; she would ask the mother 
to come and see the blossom. 

Another flower that Ella saw for the first time was 
the yellow daisy, the golden rudbeckia. She had no 
dream of fairyland about this, for it was a gorgeous, 
rollicking yellow blossom, ready to be picked and go 


GRADUATION DAY AND ITS MISFORTUNES 31 


wherever any one might wish to carry it and to make 
friends with anybody. It was away off in the middle 
of a field; and although Ella had been taught never to 
trample down the tall grass, she could not resist the 
temptation to plunge into the midst of it and secure 
the wheel of gold that might have come from the end 
of the rainbow. 

These were the rarities in flowers, but everywhere 
there were violets and daisies and anemones and hard- 
hack and Quaker ladies, and swamp azaleas, and 
dandelions and clover and all the other “common 
flowers” that are beloved by children. Nestled on the 
sunny side of a stone wall at the north of the seminary 
there was what had once been a flower bed. Little of 
the bed remained except a merry row of white narcissi, 
who perked up their red-edged ruffs and nodded their 
heads in friendly fashion as the child and the dog drew 
near. 

Between the narcissi and the gray old stone wall 
behind them was Ella’s little burial ground. It hap¬ 
pened sometimes that birds flew against the lighted 
windows of the seminary so violently that they were 
killed. Ella was always grieved when she found one 
lying on the grass, and she chose this bit of ground as 
a resting place for them. “Ponto,” she said to the big 
shaggy dog, “it was in our Sunday school lesson yes¬ 
terday that God always noticed when a little bird fell 
to the ground. The teacher said the verse didn’t mean 
exactly what it said, because God wouldn’t care for 


32 


ELLA 


birds; but I think it did; and I think He would like it 
if you and I made a pretty place for them to lie in. 
We’ll do it, won’t we, Ponto?” She held out her 
hand to the dog, and he laid his shaggy paw into 
it. “I knew you would understand,” said Ella. “I 
wonder why dogs and cats and birds and horses 
understand so much better than people!” 

After this, whenever Ella picked up a little dead 
bird, she dug a tiny grave and lined it with fresh green 
ferns. She smoothed down the soft feathers, kissed 
the pretty little head, and laid the bird softly into its 
ferny bed. “A person would have to have a stone 
with poetry on it,” she said to Ponto, “but I think a 
lovely white narcissus is much prettier for a little bird. 
Remember that this is all a secret, Ponto. Nobody 
must know anything about it except you and me and 
God.” 

Down over the hill below the little cemetery was 
the island. This was really nothing more than a tus¬ 
sock just big enough to hold a few bushes, and the 
“body of water” which surrounded it was only a bit 
of swamp. Ella could easily step across from what 
she called the “main land,” but a bridge made the 
place seem more like an island, so she laid a board 
across the narrow strait. When she was once across 
she always drew the board over after her; and then 
she stood in a kingdom that was all her own. There 
were white violets growing in this island kingdom, 
there were ferns and rushes and wild lilies of the val- 


GRADUATION DAY AND ITS MISFORTUNES 33 

ley. There was just one Jack-in-the-pulpit, and on its 
seminary side Ella had drawn the ferns together so as 
to screen it from the eager hands of passers-by. 

Then, too, there was the secret, and no one knew of 
this save the mother and the professor. On the high¬ 
est part of the tiny island, just where the bushes were 
thickest, there was a bird’s nest with real eggs, and a 
little later, real birds in it. Mother birds are shy of 
grown folk, but there are sometimes children of whom 
they feel no fear, recognizing perhaps some “call of 
the wild” that makes them akin. However that may 
be, these birds were not afraid of the little girl who 
always spoke to them softly and touched the young 
ones as gently as the mother bird herself. They made 
no objection when the child carefully lifted the half- 
grown fledglings out of the nest; and while she sat 
holding them and talking to them, the parent birds 
made little flights here and there as if, having now a 
reliable nurse for their children, they might allow 
themselves a little recreation. 

When Ella first saw the young birds with their wide- 
open mouths, she was sure that they were dying of 
hunger. But what could she give them? She had no 
more idea how to feed young robins than young fair¬ 
ies. There was just one person in the seminary who 
could tell her, for he always knew everything; but he 
was in a class, teaching some of the big boys algebra. 
What algebra was, Ella had no idea; but she was ab¬ 
solutely certain that it could not be half so important 


34 


ELLA 


as saving the life of a starving bird. She hurried to the 
house, and up stairs, then crept silently as a shadow 
along the corridor to the recitation room. The door 
was wide open. She stood on the threshold a moment, 
trying to get her courage up. The young men of the 
class smiled, for they were always interested in Ella’s 
exploits and wondered what was coming now. The 
professor was standing at the board with his back to 
the door. 

Ella was a little frightened, but she screwed her 
courage up and said in a weak, thin little voice, 

“Professor, please may I see you only just one min¬ 
ute? It’s very important.” 

The professor came out, and closing the door be¬ 
hind him, which the students thought was a little 
unkind, he asked the visitor what he could do for 
her. 

“It’s the birds,” she explained. “They were only 
eggs, but now they’re little birds, and they’re so hun¬ 
gry they are starving. I don’t know what to do,” and 
the tale ended in what sounded much like the begin¬ 
ning of a sob. 

“That’s all right,” said the professor gently. 
“The mother bird knows how to take care of 
them; but if you want to help, just dig some angle 
worms and put them on the island where she can 
see them.” 

“Oh, thank you,” cried Ella. “I knew I must do 
something, but I didn’t know what.” 


GRADUATION DAY AND ITS MISFORTUNES 35 


Ella’s mother told her that she ought to apologize 
to the professor for interrupting his class. She went 
to him obediently and said, 

“Professor, I am sorry I interrupted your class, but 
I don’t think I did — much — and anyway the birds 
had to be fed.” 

“So they did,” said the professor kindly, “and 
more interruptions of that sort would be better for 
birds and for people.” 

I am afraid that Ella was not exactly a model child, 
for she cut her name on a tree in the circle with the 
Christmas jackknife, much to the wrath of the man 
who cared for the grounds. She came in promptly 
when the mother, for fear of the lightning, called her 
in from the piazza during a heavy thunderstorm; but 
the next minute she was in the highest cupola. The 
time spent in the gloomy basement dining-room 
seemed to her so unbearably long that the mother 
sometimes yielded to her pleadings and excused her 
before the meal was over. This, the principal sug¬ 
gested, was not quite the thing to do, as it broke up 
the “uniformity,” whatever that may have been; so 
the mother told her she must remain through the 
meal. Ella remained, but she brought a little story¬ 
book and quietly read through the last quarter of an 
hour. The big boys smiled in comprehension of the 
situation, and the principal made an unconditional 
surrender. To Ella he said, “You need not wait if 
you would rather go out”; and to the boys, “If you 


36 


ELLA 


would save every minute as that child does, you would 
accomplish a great deal more.” 

The mother wrote to the grandmother in the 
mountains: 

“Ella is very obedient, but she always thinks of 
something else. I will describe her, so the children 
can fancy a little how she looks. She has on a black 
beaver cloak, black felt hat trimmed with scarlet 
velvet and plumes, a chinchilla muff, and chenille 
scarf. She has just come in from church, and now, 
before her things are taken off, is reading her Sabbath- 
school book. She devours all the books that she finds.” 

Ella’s worst — and most innocent — exploit was 
her sudden disappearance on the most important day 
of the whole school year. The first class was to grad¬ 
uate. It consisted of two students. One was to have 
the valedictory and the other the salutatory; but it 
was to be just as real a graduation as if there had been 
forty to go out into the world with the seminary’s 
blessing upon them. 

It was indeed a great day. Every class was to re¬ 
cite. Compositions were to be read, songs sung, the 
piano played, diplomas presented, speeches made, 
and trustee meetings held. There was to be a colla¬ 
tion, and the village band was to play while people 
ate. Surely nothing could be more festive than this. 
The building was crowded with guests. There were 
the people of the village, the home friends of the 
students, the people who used to be students in the 


GRADUATION DAY AND ITS MISFORTUNES 37 


early days, the thirty-six trustees whose fostering 
care was so necessary to the success of the school, and 
many other folk who came just because something 
was going on and they wanted to be in it. 

Everything began finely. At nine, ten, eleven, the 
big bell in the belfry rang, and the members of the 
first three series of classes made plain to the delighted 
visitors how learned the year’s work had made them. 
The bell struck twelve. This was the signal for Ella’s 
French class, and after that the collation was to come. 
But where was Ella? The classes were so small that 
the absence of even one student was noticeable, and a 
messenger was sent to the mother, who was hearing 
her class in botany. 

In those days, the more difficult the wording of 
a textbook, the more intellectual good those who 
studied it were supposed to get from its pages, and a 
member of the class in botany was at that moment 
declaring that “The cypripedium is perfectly sym¬ 
metrical, yet has irregular cohesion in the calyx, great 
inequality in the petals, cohesion, adhesion, and meta¬ 
morphosis in the —” but the guests were never told 
by that class where “cohesion, adhesion, and meta¬ 
morphosis” might be found, for their teacher dropped 
the book and forgot all about cypripedium and every¬ 
thing else except that her one little girl was missing. 
Ella had established an enviable reputation for punc¬ 
tuality, and if she was not in her class, then some- 
thing had happened. 


38 


ELLA 


A general alarm was given. Speeches, collation, 
graduating exercises were all forgotten, and a search 
was begun. The boys and girls and the faculty and the 
trustees and the guests all set out to explore the coun¬ 
try. A man at work in a field said that he had seen a 
little girl in a red cape going toward the lake; and to 
the lake the whole company went. In the moist sand 
were prints of little feet going straight to the water’s 
edge, and the mother’s face turned white. But beside 
them were the marks of Ponto’s sturdy paws. 

“The dog is with her,” said the steward. “You 
need not be the least bit afraid. Ponto would never 
let anything happen to her.” 

But the mother was not comforted. Just what dogs 
would do, she knew not; but she did know that water 
would drown little children. 

Some one had caught sight of a child in a Red Rid¬ 
ing Hood cape strolling leisurely dow T n a little hill on 
the right. The dog was with her, and they were hav¬ 
ing a fine ramble together. The people shouted to her, 
and Ponto answered with a deep and surprised “Bow¬ 
wow!” which probably meant, 

“Of course I’m glad to see you, but what are you 
here for? Can’t you let us take a little walk?” 

“Where have you been?” cried the mother, as the 
little girl came near. 

“Over on the hill to get some flowers,” Ella replied 
serenely. 

Then the mother told her how the footprints lead¬ 
ing into the water had frightened her. 


GRADUATION DAY AND ITS MISFORTUNES 39 


“Did you think I would walk right into the water 
and be drowned? ” exclaimed Ella in disgust. “A baby 
a week old wouldn’t be so silly as to do that. I walked 
ever so far close to the water, but I suppose it washed 
the footprints away.” This was just what had hap¬ 
pened, but no one had noticed that the wind was 
blowing toward the land. As to the French class, the 
mother had told her that it would meet at two in the 
afternoon, and when the hour was changed to twelve, 
she had forgotten to notify the small pupil, and then 
in the fear and confusion forgot that she had forgot¬ 
ten. 

So they all went back through the lane to the semi¬ 
nary to gather up the fragments of the great day. 
The French class never welcomed its guests with a 
“Comment vous portez-vous, mesdames et mes¬ 
sieurs?” but the collation was still palatable, the 
speeches were made, the valedictory and the saluta¬ 
tory were read, the band played the pieces they had 
been practicing, and the two students were as thor¬ 
oughly graduated as if a little girl in a* Red Riding 
Hood cloak had not interfered with the proceedings. 

The mother had decided to return to the city, and 
this was Ella’s last day at the seminary, and the end 
of her first year of school life. She would have been 
broken-hearted over leaving, had it not been that she 
was going to visit her grandmother; and a month 
with a grandmother will make up to little girls for 
many losses. 


CHAPTER V 

ON THE WAY TO GRANDMOTHER’S 

There were two grandmothers. The one with white 
curly hair that glistened in the sunshine lived in the 
village where Ella was born. It was a pretty village 
with hills and brooks and winding roads and mead¬ 
ows of flowers, and old-fashioned houses with piaz¬ 
zas and tall white pillars. Back of Ella’s home was 
a hill where great apple trees grew, and the very first 
thing that she remembered in the world was her fa¬ 
ther’s lifting her up into one of them, all sweet and 
dainty with pink-and-white blossoms, and telling her 
to pick as many as she pleased. 

When they went to the grandmother’s, they walked 
straight up the village street, where a line of houses 
stood on one side and woods on the other. They were 
beautiful woods. Columbines grew in the clefts of the 
rocks, delicate pink windflowers blossomed in the lit¬ 
tle glades and the brave and cheery dandelions came 
out to the very edge of the road to give a welcome to 
those who loved them. 

The mother had told her little daughter that one of 
the names of the columbine was Aquilegia Canaden¬ 
sis; of the windflower was Anemone Nemorosa; and of 
the dandelion was Taraxacum Officinale, just for the 
pleasure of seeing how so small a child would manage 


ON THE WAY TO GRANDMOTHERS 41 


the long names. Ella felt especially well acquainted 
with those flowers whose “company names,” as she 
said, she had learned; and when she was alone with 
them and talked to them, she often called them by 
these names and pretended that she had come to 
make a call. “Miss Anemone Neinorosa,” she would 
say, “are you sure that you are feeling quite well to¬ 
day?’' or, “Miss Aquilegia Canadensis, I think I saw 
a cousin of yours in the garden just now. Your dress 
is red and yellow, but hers was pink. Maybe she was 
your sister.” She fancied that they liked the little 
formality, and she was almost surprised that they did 
not answer her questions. 

Beyond the woods was a bridge hanging high over a 
deep black river. Ella did not like dark, still water; 
and when they were crossing this bridge, she always 
held fast to her mother’s or her father’s hand. After 
they had crossed the bridge, they went up a little hill, 
not by the road, but through a field and over ledges 
where the sweet-smelling saxifrage grew; and then 
they came to grandmother’s little wooden gate that 
always closed of itself after they had gone through it. 

They passed the balm of Gilead tree with its sticky 
buds, the black currant bush, and the great bush of 
white roses with creamy centers. Then Ella ran 
across the grass to the door, for grandmother was al¬ 
most sure to see them and to come to the doorway to 
give them a welcome. 

Grandmother’s house was one of a little group of 


42 


ELLA 


white houses standing on the ledges at the top of the 
hill. These formed the tiny village within a village 
which was called the “New City.” Ella was always 
so happy at her grandmother’s that long after she 
was old enough to go to Sunday school, she always 
confused the “New City” with the “New Jeru¬ 
salem.” 

This was the “village grandma,” as Ella called her. 
But there was also the “mountain grandma,” and it 
was to her house that the little girl and her mother 
were going. Now when good New Englanders are 
starting for anywhere, they always begin by taking 
the morning train to Boston; so of course that was 
what our two travelers did. 

Going to Boston, even if she did not go any farther, 
was a great treat to Ella. There were windows full of 
blankbooks, and what stories she could write in them, 
she thought longingly. There were whole stores full 
of toys; and in the window of one of these stores lay a 
box of tin soldiers. Ella looked again. It was exactly 
like the box that she had wanted. Maybe it was the 
very same one. It certainly was the same store. 

“Mother,” she said, “that is my box of tin soldiers 
that uncle did not give me; but I’m so old now that I 
don’t care for it. I’d rather have the muff.” 

“Don’t you love your uncle enough to forget that? ” 
her mother asked. 

“I love him better than almost anybody in the 
world,” said Ella, “and I do forget it except when I 


ON THE WAY TO GRANDMOTHERS 43 


happen to think of it. But he really did break his 
promise,” she added slowly. 

They left the stores and went to the Common. 
Ella’s little book of history said that in the Revolu¬ 
tionary War the Americans pitched their tents on the 
Common; and she fancied that she knew just where 
those tents stood. She had also read about the battle 
of Bunker Hill, and she never felt that she was really 
in Boston until she had caught sight of the monument 
in memory of it standing tall and gray against the 
northern sky. 

At one side of the Common was the Capitol. The 
mother told Ella that the laws for the whole State of 
Massachusetts were made in that building. 

“Do they ever make a mistake and make a bad 
law?” asked Ella. 

“Perhaps they do sometimes,” the mother replied 
rather unwillingly, for she wanted her little girl to 
grow up with deep respect for the institutions of her 
country. 

Ella thought a minute; then she asked slowly, 

“If they made a law that everybody must tell lies, 
which would be naughtier, to obey it or not to obey 
it?” 

Just then a man began to scatter grain for the 
pigeons, and Ella forgot all about laws whether 
good or bad. 

Of all the pleasures of Boston, there was one that 
Ella wanted more than she had wanted the tin sol- 


44 


ELLA 


diers, but she feared she would never be permitted to 
enjoy it. This pleasure was, to have just one ride in 
the swan boats in the Public Garden. The mother was 
afraid of boats, especially of little ones, and Ella saw 
no hope of the ride that she wanted so badly. 

“Couldn’t I go for just one minute?” she pleaded. 
“I couldn’t possibly drown in one minute if I tried. 
Couldn’t I just get in and get out again?” 

But the mother had no idea how deep the water 
might be, and she always answered, 

“No, not until you are tall enough to wade out if 
the boat tips over.” 

“But I'll be a woman then,” said Ella, “and tall 
women don’t ride in the swan boats.” 

“You can take some little girl with you, and maybe 
the man with the boat will think you are a little girl 
too.” 

“But I don’t want to take a little girl. I want 
some one to take me while I am a little girl. I don’t 
care for the tin soldiers now, and I’m afraid that by 
and by I shan’t care for the swan boats; and then I 
shan’t ever have had a ride in them, and I’ll be sorry 
all my life that I had to leave it out.” 

But the mother was turning toward the railroad 
station. There would be only time enough to go 
there and to get some lunch, she said, and they must 
not stay in the Garden any longer. 

After lunch they went on board the train, and be¬ 
fore long they had crossed the line and were in New 


45 


ON THE WAY TO GRANDMOTHERS 

Hampshire. Ella had a tiny yellow-covered geography 
at home, and she knew from the map just how New 
Hampshire ought to look. It ought to look like a tall, 
narrow chair with a very straight back. But from 
the car window it looked like wide fields of grass and 
clover and daisies and hills and brooks and valleys. 
Here and there were great elms, their branches sway¬ 
ing gracefully in every breeze. Along the rail fences 
were bushes of what Ella was almost certain were 
blackberries, and nearly ripe. There were deep woods, 
too, and now and then she caught a glimpse of a 
gleaming yellow or white blossom as the train hurried 
onward. Sometimes they rode for quite a long way 
beside the blue Merrimack River. It was low water, 
and she could see the markings that the current had 
left on the sand. They were just like the markings in 
the little brooks that she always liked so much, only 
these were larger. 

Early in the afternoon they came to Concord, and 
the mother’s friend met them at the station. But what 
did this mean? Ella’s eyes grew bigger and bigger, for 
the friend held by the hand a little girl about as tall as 
Ella. After she had greeted them, she said to Ella, 

“This little girl has come to live just across the 
street from us, and I am sure that you will be good 
friends. Her name is Ida Lester, and she has come to 
meet you and walk home with you.” 

So the mother and her friend walked up the shady 
street, and the two little girls walked along behind 


4G 


ELLA 


them, looking shyly at each other. Ella liked Ida, 
and Ida liked Ella. 

“Do you like checkerberry candy?” asked Ella. 

“Yes, I do,” Ida replied. “I had a stick of red and 
white peppermint candy yesterday.” 

“A lady on the cars gave me some checkerberry 
candy,” said Ella. “I wish I had saved half of it for 

y°u.” 

“I wish I had saved half of mine for you,” said 
Ida heartily. “I will next time. Are you going to 
live here?” 

“ Oh, no,” replied Ella. “We are just going to make 
a little visit, and then we’re going to see my grand¬ 
mother in New Hampshire.” 

“But this is New Hampshire,” said Ida, looking 
puzzled. 

“Is it? I know it said ‘New Hampshire’ on the 
tickets, but I don’t call it ‘New Hampshire’ till I get 
where my grandmother is. But I’d just as soon,” she 
added quickly, for she was afraid she had not been 
exactly polite to this new friend, “and I’m so glad you 
live here.” 

“I’m glad you’ve come,” said Ida. “Did you bring 
your dolls? Do you like to play ‘house’ or ‘school’ 
better?” 

“I like to play both,” said Ella. “I brought my 
big doll, because she is the one I sleep with and the 
one I love best.” 


“What is her name?” 


ON THE WAY TO GRANDMOTHERS 


47 


“Minnie May Ida May. I like ‘May’ and that’s 
why I put it in twice.” 

You put in my name, too,” cried Ida joyfully. 

I am so glad you chose it even before you ever saw 
me. I’m going to name my biggest doll over again, 
and call her Minnie May Ella May.” 

“There wasn’t room for any more dolls in the 
trunk, ’ said Ella, “but I brought ever so many paper 
dolls and some pretty paper to make them some more 
dresses. I’ll give you some.” 

“Oh, good!” Ida exclaimed. “My front steps are a 
splendid place to play with paper dolls; and there’s a 
deep dark crack where we can put them when they 
are naughty. We’ll have to tie a string around them 
though, so we can pull them up again. Come over 
now, will you? No, I forgot. My father raised some 
beans and they got mixed. He told me to pick them 
over this afternoon and put all the white ones in one 
box, the yellow in another, and the pink in another. 
He’s going to plant them in the spring.” 

“I’ll help you,” Ella cried eagerly, “and we’ll play 
that we are in a castle where a wicked giant lives, and 
that he will whip us just dreadfully if we make any 
mistakes; and we’ll be thinking up some plan to get 
away from him.” 

And so it was that the two little girls became 
friends. They had fine times together playing 
“house” and “school,” and working on bits of canvas 
with bright-colored worsteds in cross stitch, and 


48 


ELLA 


telling stories to each other. Sometimes they wrote 
their stories and read them to the long rows of paper 
dolls standing up against the steps. Ella had a great 
admiration for Ida’s handwriting. Ella’s own writing 
had perhaps improved a very little, but even now it 
looked much like a fence that had been caught in 
an earthquake, its pickets and rails sticking out in 
all directions; but Ida’s was fair and round and looked 
quite as if she was grown up. 

One reason why they liked to write stories was be¬ 
cause they always tied the tiny books together with 
bright ribbons. Ida had a big box of odds and ends of 
ribbon, and these she shared generously with Ella. 
They had been given to her by her Sunday school 
teacher, who had a little millinery store. Ella did not 
wish to give up her own Sunday school teacher, but 
she did think it would be very agreeable if she would 
open a millinery store. 

The two little girls did all sorts of pleasant things 
together. When Saturday came, Ida ran across the 
street, her face all aglow with smiles, and gave Ella’s 
mother a note. Ella could hardly wait till her mother 
had read it, and she stood first on one foot, then on the 
other. The note said, 

“Will you please let Ella put on a big apron and 
come to dinner with Ida to-day?” 

“Oh, mother, may I go? May I? May I? May I?" 
cried Ella, dancing about the room. “I know we are 
to do something nice. What is it, Ida? ” 







ida’s mother looked in at the door to make 

SURE THAT ALL WAS GOING ON WELL 














































ON THE WAY TO GRANDMOTHERS 49 


Ida only laughed, but the mother said yes, and the 
girls ran across the street and pinned on the big 
aprons. Then Ida opened a door into a little room 
back of the kitchen that Ella had never seen. 

“This is the Saturday room,” she said. 

“Oh, that’s lovely!” Ella cried. “I never saw such 
a beauty. Can you really do things with it?” 

“Just like a big one,” replied Ida, “and every 
Saturday mother lets me cook my dinner on it.” 

“It” was a little cookstove, the top not much more 
than a foot square. It had four little griddles and an 
oven and a little stovepipe that opened into the pipe 
of the big stove in the kitchen. Beside the stove was 
a small closet, and on the low hooks hung a mixing- 
spoon, a steel fork and knife, a griddle, and a wire 
broiler. On the shelf above was a mixing-bowl, a 
little cake pan, a small kettle, and a muffin pan that 
was just large enough to hold six muffins. Above 
these was a pretty set of blue-and-white dishes, and 
small knives, spoons, and forks. In one corner of the 
room was a table, and in its drawers were napkins 
and a tablecloth. 

“And does your mother really let you get your own 
dinner?” cried Ella. 

“Yes, she does,” said Ida. “She says that little 
girls always like to cook, and they may as well learn 
the right way as to play with scraps of dough that 
their mothers have made. We’re going to have steak 
and sweet potatoes and lettuce to-day, and black- 


50 


ELLA 


berries and cream for our dessert. I made the fire 
before I came over, and the potatoes are all washed 
and ready to boil.” 

“And may I help?” cried Ella. 

“Of course you may. If you will put the potatoes 
into the kettle, I will wash the lettuce. We’ll set the 
table together, and then you shall broil the steak 
while I go to mother’s refrigerator for the black¬ 
berries and the cream.” 

Once in a while Ida’s mother looked in at the door 
to make sure that all was going on well, and when the 
little girls had sat down to the table, she came and 
looked it over and said, 

“Well, children, I think you have done everything 
as well as I could. I should really like to sit down and 
eat dinner with you.” 

“Oh, do, do! ” the girls cried; but Ida’s mother only 
smiled and shook her head. 

“Your father will be here soon,” she said, “and I’m 
afraid there would not be enough for us all. When 
you are a little older, you shall cook a dinner for us 
some day, and if Ella is here, we will ask her to come 
and help.” 


CHAPTER VI 

THE REAL NEW HAMPSHIRE 

On Ella’s side of the street, as well as on Ida’s, inter¬ 
esting things were often going on. The mother and 
her friend were making wax flowers, and this was a 
delight to see. Ella thought that the pink mossrose 
buds were the loveliest things in the world. The 
mother had brought with her some thin sheets of 
white wax, and out of these she cut the petals, using 
the real buds for patterns. Some people made the 
petals of pink wax, but it was thought to be much 
more artistic to make them of white and paint them 
with pink powder. 

These were pressed into the hollow of the hand and 
bent around the wire stem. Real moss from the north 
side of the beech tree was twisted on at the base of 
the petals. Leaves were made by dipping real rose 
leaves first into water, then into melted green wax 
and peeling off the impression of the under side to use. 
The rosebuds and the sprays of leaves were brought 
gracefully together, and there was the bouquet, all 
ready to take its stand in a little vase under a glass 
shade on the parlor mantel. 

Wax pond lilies, with long stems of green rubber, 
were also made. The stems were coiled upon a round 
piece of looking-glass to represent water. A glass 


52 


ELLA 


shade in the shape of a half sphere was placed over 
them, finished with a chenille cord. “And there you 
have a thing that will always be an ornament for your 
parlor,” said the teachers of wax-flower-making. “It 
will never go out of fashion because it is true to 
nature.” 

The two grown-ups were very kind to the smaller 
folk. They let them try and try until they had each 
made a really pretty bud and a spray of leaves to go 
with it. Then they made some little forget-me-nots 
and some syringas. This was as much as they could 
find time for without neglecting their large families of 
dolls. 

One day Ella’s mother and her friend planned to go 
a little way out of the city to call on an old friend of 
theirs. 

Put on your blue-and-white checked silk and your 
leghorn hat,” said the mother. 

“Do I have to go?” Ella asked in dismay, for she 
and Ida had some interesting plans for the afternoon. 

Yes, said her mother. “This lady is an old 
friend, and she will want to see you.” 

“Would she want to see me if she knew that I 
didn’t want to come?” 

I really can t say about that,” said the mother 
with a smile, “but I’ll tell you something that I do 
know. I have noticed that when little girls do a thing 
because their mothers want them to, something 
pleasant is almost sure to happen before long.” 




THE REAL NEW HAMPSHIRE 


53 


Ella did not know of anything pleasant that would 
be likely to happen in this call, and nothing did hap¬ 
pen. The lady did not seem especially glad to see her. 
There was not a child or a cat or a dog to play with. 
There were a few books, but they were shut up in a 
tall bookcase with glass doors, and Ella was almost 
sure that it would not do to ask if she might take one 
to read. She sat in a stiff chair by the window, think¬ 
ing of what she and Ida had meant to do. After a 
long, long time they said good-bye and started for 
home. 

On the way Ella picked up a little stone and asked 
her mother if it was a fossil. 

“Here’s a gentleman who will tell you,” said 
mother’s friend, and she introduced a tall man with 
white hair and deep blue eyes who was coming toward 
them. 

“Doctor,” she said, “here is a little girl who wants 
to know whether her stone is a fossil.” 

“Indeed,” said he with a kindly look at Ella. “I 
am afraid it is not; but what does she know about 
fossils?” 

“Very little,” said her mother; “but even when she 
was very small, she was always bringing in pebbles 
and asking if they did not have names just as flowers 
did. Her father told her the names of a few of the 
minerals that were most common about our home, 
and she is always looking for them.” 

“ I think I must give myself the pleasure of showing 


54 


ELLA 


her my cabinets,” said the Doctor. “Not many little 
girls care for minerals. May I take her home with me 
now?” 

Then came a happy time. The Doctor had great 
cases full of the most interesting minerals. He soon 
found that Ella liked fossils and crystals especially, 
and as he showed them to her one by one, he told her 
stories of the places where he found them and of the 
fossils that were once living plants or animals a long, 
long time ago. 

“Was it before you were born?” Ella asked, and 
wondered a little why he looked so amused when he 
answered yes. 

When it was time for her to go home, the Doctor 
gave her a real fossil, a piece of rose quartz, and a little 
deep red garnet. He walked home with her, and when 
he left her, he said: 

“I am going away in the morning, but I shall send 
you before long a package of specimens marked with 
their names and where they were found. Maybe some 
day we shall have a great mineralogist whose name 
will be Ella. I take off my hat to the mineralogist of 
the future,” he said with a friendly smile. 

Ella was the happiest little girl in town. “He took 
off his hat to me just as if I had been a grown lady,” 
she told her mother. 

The Doctor kept his promise, and not long after¬ 
wards he sent her a package of fifty or sixty minerals, 
all marked as he had said they would be. Ella wrote 


THE REAL NEW HAMPSHIRE 


55 


him a little letter, in her funny handwriting that 
looked as if it had been out in an earthquake, and told 
him how pleased she was to have them, and how much 
she liked to look them over. One thing puzzled her, 
however. The good Doctor must have forgotten for a 
moment what a little girl she was, for he had put into 
the package a pamphlet that he had written for some 
learned society about the cacao tree. It was a thick 
pamphlet in the finest of print and with the lines very 
close together. 

“I can’t tell him that I am glad to have this to 
read,” said Ella in dismay, “for I’m not. What shall 
Ido?” 

“It was kind in him to send it to you,” her mother 
replied, “and you can thank him for his kindness. 
That will be perfectly honest. You need not tell him 
that you will enjoy reading it.” 

Ella was having a good time, but when night came, 
she was often a little homesick for the grandmother 
and the “real New Hampshire,” and she did not 
grieve when she and her mother took the train for the 
mountains. She was very sorry to leave Ida, but the 
mother had promised her friend to stop on her way 
home. Ella had agreed to bring Ida some maple 
sugar; and the two little girls said good-bye without 
any tears. They exchanged parting gifts. Ella gave 
Ida “Minnie Warren,” her very best paper doll, 
and Ida gave Ella a little book with a story in it that 
she had written. It was tied with a bright red rib- 


56 


ELLA 


bon, and on the cover was written, “The Lost Child, 
A True Story Made up by Ida Lester.” 

After an hour in the cars, Ella and her mother came 
to the most delightful part of the journey. The train 
stopped, then rushed on toward the north, leaving 
them standing beside a wharf that stretched out into 
a beautiful lake, blue as the sky and full of dainty lit¬ 
tle islands all rocks and trees and ferns. The lake 
seemed to have been dropped softly into a hollow 
among the mountains, for they were all around it, 
bending over it as if they loved it, Ella thought. 

A shining white steamboat was coming into sight 
around an island. It did not blow any whistle, but 
floated up to the wharf as gracefully as a swan, mak¬ 
ing only the gentlest of ripples in the blue water. This 
was the “Lady of the Lake.” Ella thought the name 
had been given to the boat because it seemed so gentle 
and so ladylike. 

They went on board, and as the steamboat made a 
wide curve away from the wharf and set out on her 
course across the blue water, roaming in and out 
among the islands, Ella joyfully watched for the 
peaks that she knew best in the ranges that circled 
around the old homestead. From one point on the 
steamer’s course Mt. Washington could be seen for a 
few minutes. Ella was looking for it eagerly when she 
saw a man with a harp coming up from the lower 
deck. A little girl followed him, and as he began to 
play, she sang in a sweet, clear voice. 


THE REAL NEW HAMPSHIRE 


57 


Mother, Ella whispered, couldn’t I ever learn 
to sing like that? I d rather do it than almost any¬ 
thing else in the world.” 

The singing stopped and the man passed his hat 
around for money. Ella looked at the little singing 
girl and found that the singer was looking at her. 

Couldn t I go and speak to her?” she asked, and 
her mother said, “Yes, if you like. I think she looks 
rather lonely.” 

So Ella went up to the singing girl a little shyly and 
said: 

“I think your singing is beautiful. I wish I could 
go about and sing and be on a boat always.” 

“I heard you say to your mother that you were go¬ 
ing to your grandmother’s, and I wished and wished 
that I had a grandmother and could go to see her and 
play like other children. I’d so much rather than to 
go about singing.” 

But the father was beckoning to her to get ready to 
go ashore, and Ella went back to her mother. 

“I can see him! I can see him!” she cried. “And 
there’s the gray horse!” 

One of her uncles always met them at the Harbor. 
Ella had caught sight of him on the wharf, and she 
had no more thought just then for the singing girl. 

Pretty soon they were seated in the wagon and 
were riding slowly along the road that wound higher 
and higher up among the hills to the old homestead. 
It was good to go slowly, Ella thought, for every 


58 


ELLA 


mountain and every tree seemed like an old friend, 
and it would hurt their feelings if she hurried past 
them. 

There were two roads that found their way to “the 
West,” that is, the little village that was nearest to 
the homestead, and it was always a question which to 
choose. One led over a hill so high that it was almost a 
young mountain. Indeed, when Ella was smaller, she 
had fancied that if the road had not held it down like 
a strap, it would have grown into a mountain. The 
other road was shorter, but full of rocks, as if it had 
once been the bed of a river. The horse knew it well. 
He had learned just how to twist and turn among the 
rocks, and even if one wheel was a foot higher than 
another, there was no real danger of an overthrow, 
day or night. 

Upward they went, past tiny villages, little blue 
ponds, comfortable farmhouses, usually in charge of a 
big dog, who came out to the road and greeted them 
with a friendly wag of the tail; past meadows and 
mowing lots; beside “sap orchards” of maple trees; 
through deep woods, dark and cool even that warm 
summer afternoon; past the tiny red schoolhouse un¬ 
der the maples at the crossroads. Ella had been there 
to school with an older cousin one day, and she 
thought that going to school and sitting at a desk 
must be the most delightful thing in the world. She 
had been allowed to sit, not with the little children, 
but, because she was company, on the high seats at 


THE REAL NEW HAMPSHIRE 


59 


the back of the room with the big girls. They were 
parsing in “Paradise Lost.” Ella had no idea what 
either “Paradise Lost” or “parsing” might be, but 
she was sure it must be something very agreeable. 
They had carried their dinner in a tin pail; and this, 
she thought, was a wonderfully fine thing to do, for 
when noon came, they ate it under the trees just as if 
they were on a picnic. Then they played in the brook 
and made playhouses, marking them out with white 
stones on the grass. They made wreaths of maple 
leaves, pinning them together with their long stems, 
and they pulled up long sprays of creeping Jenny to 
drape over their playhouses at home. 

But now they were on the crossroad that led to 
grandmother’s, and Ella was getting much excited. 
“I know she will hear us when we go over the cause¬ 
way,” she cried, “ and she will come to the road to 
meet us”; and so it was, for two minutes later they 
could see the end of the house and the big asparagus 
bush standing under one of the west windows. Half a 
minute more, and they were at the gate, and there 
stood grandma and grandpa, and the uncles and the 
aunts and the cousins, and such a welcome as there 
was! Then came supper, with cottage cheese, made as 
no one but grandma could make it, custard pie, hot 
biscuit and maple syrup made from the sap of the 
very trees that they had just passed, and as many 
other good things as the table would hold. 

After Ella was curled up in bed that night, she said: 


60 


ELLA 


“ Mother, I don’t believe I want to sing on a boat. 
I’d rather be a little girl at her grandmother’s. Will 
you please take out my thick shoes? I shall be too 
busy to look for them in the morning.” 

The mother went back to have a little talk alone 
with grandmother. She was sitting in her straight- 
backed rocking-chair. There were tears in her eyes. 
She looked up as the mother came in. 

“The child looks more like her father every year,” 
said grandmother. 

The mother nodded. Her eyes, too, were full of 
tears, and she could not speak. 


CHAPTER VII 

BOY COUSIN 

Ella was a fortunate little girl in having so many 
cousins. Some were tall, some were short; some had 
blue eyes, and some had black; some had curly hair 
and some had straight hair; some lived near the 
grandfather’s, some lived a long drive away, and 
some lived many hundreds of miles away. Most of 
them were younger; two or three were older. When 
one is nine, three or four years make a great difference, 
and Ella looked upon these older ones as being 
quite mature persons. She loved them all, but her 
special playmate was Boy Cousin, a boy of her own 
age who lived nearest. 

When morning came, there were so many interest¬ 
ing things to do that Ella hardly knew how to choose 
among them. First of all, she must of course have a 
good long look at the mountains, every one of them. 
Little girl as she was, she could remember when some 
of them were a little different in their appearance. 
The nearest one was Ossipee, a kindly, friendly, sunny 
mountain, with a great pasture running far up the 
side to a gray rock that looked quite like a cabin. 
This had not come into view until the trees about it 
had been cut down. The children realized that the 
“cabin” was much larger than it appeared, and they 


62 


ELLA 


had made up a story to the effect that a good-natured 
giant from the other side of the mountain had come 
over to this side, bringing his house with him. 

Beyond this rock were ledges, and after a rain the 
water ran down over them in a silver sheet. The chil- 

i 

dren called them the Shining Rocks, the home of the 
sunbeam fairies. They had once climbed to the top of 
the mountain, and when they came to the rocks, they 
more than half expected to catch a glimpse of a little 
man in grass-green hat or a dainty fairy queen in 
a gown of sunbeams. No fairies appeared, and they 
decided that it was foolish to expect them, for every 
one ought to know that they will not appear when 
grown-ups are about. 

To the west lay Israel, massive and dignified. That 
had not changed; but Ella felt sure that Whiteface 
was not quite the same. It was called Whiteface be¬ 
cause a slide many years before had torn off the 
face of the mountain, and left only the bare white 

granite. Every summer the trees and bushes made 

♦ 

their way a little farther in upon the rocks; and a 
keen observer could really see that the slide was a 
little less white and a little more green. 

Away to the north was Chocorua, the mountain 
that in sun and shade and mist and tempest and calm 
was always an exquisite picture. It lay with quiet 
majesty on the horizon, stately and beautiful. The 
forest had crept up the sides, but the summit was a 
great mass of granite, sharply pointed and reaching 


BOY COUSIN 


63 


far up into the blue sky. Ella thought it looked like a 
picture that she had seen of the Alps. She did so hope 
that some day she might climb it. It would be like 
taking a trip to Europe, she thought. Of all the moun¬ 
tains in view, Chocorua was the one that she loved 
best. “I wish you could understand. I wish I could 
put my arm around you and tell you how I love you,” 
she used to whisper to it sometimes. The mountain 
looked more and more beautiful, but it made no re¬ 
ply. One day, however, a wisp of white cloud floated 
quickly over the peak while she was speaking. “You 
do understand, and you are waving to me,” she said 
to the mountain, and after this she loved it more than 
ever. 

Ella had been walking slowly down the narrow road 
that wound between the tall alder bushes down to the 
river. At one place she stopped to put aside the ferns 
growing in front of a rock of pale gray granite. The 
side of the rock nearest the road was of a darker gray 
and was shaped like a door. This was the entrance to 
fairyland, the children had decided, and Ella stood 
waiting a moment to see if the queen of the fairies 
would appear. If the queen should wear a bright pink 
dress with deep red lines, then Ella would know for 
sure that she had seen her Majesty in the little woods 
by the lake near the seminary. 

But Boy Cousin was coming up the road, and Ella 
hastily brought the ferns together, for she had begun 
to suspect that he did not believe in fairies quite so 


64 


ELLA 


firmly as she, so she did not speak of them when they 
met on the bridge. 

This bridge was made of split logs laid upon great 
rough beams of wood. On each side there was a rail 
cut with many initials. Among them was a big “E,” 
which Ella had cut the summer before. Under the 
bridge, as far up and down stream as they could see, 
there were rocks of all sizes and shapes. It was so dry 
a season that in many places the water had slipped 
out of sight among them, making a fresh, merry, 
rippling sound. 

“It’s playing hide and seek,” declared Boy Cousin, 
“and it is saying, ‘Here I am! Find me if you can!’” 

Over the river hung wild grapes, as yet green and 
sour; sprays of goldenrod; graceful and dainty white 
birches; and here and there was a bright leaf or two of 
the early autumn, or a reddening spray of bittersweet 
or the scarlet berries of the black alder. 

The children slipped down beside the bridge to one 
of their favorite places, a big flat rock overhung by a 
white birch and a maple. They were looking up 
through the branches when Ella exclaimed: 

“Just see there, Boy Cousin! See the blue sky with 
the white birch bough running across it and the little 
spray of red maple leaves! It’s our flag, our own Red, 
White, and Blue. But let’s go and see the stone house. 
We can come back here this afternoon.” 

So down the road they went. On the left was a lit¬ 
tle hill where lay some great-great-grandfathers, men 




BOY COUSIN 


65 


who had forced their way into the new country and 
cut out for themselves homes in the wilderness. Their 
graves were marked by field stones, just as they had 
been left in the early times. At one or two of them an 
initial was rudely cut into the stone. Ella wondered a 
little whether she would have liked these great-great¬ 
grandfathers or her French ones better. “I had some 
French great-great-grandfathers, too,” said Boy 
Cousin. “What a pity that we couldn’t all have 
lived at the same time!” 

On the right of the road was a row of tamarack 
trees, and over the wall a field through which the river 
ran in graceful curves, and a mass of great rocks that 
looked as if hurled together by an earthquake, but 
made the nicest places possible for little “cubby 
houses” and ovens for baking mud cakes. 

Through the bars the children went, over a little 
bridge, across the wide-spreading meadow, and up a 
hill to a rocky pasture where the gray horse was roam¬ 
ing about. 

“The horse and the rocks are the very same color,” 
said Ella. “I don’t see how you know which of them 
to put the bridle on when you go to catch him.” 

“That’s easy,” replied Boy Cousin. “ I just look 
the rocks over, and put the bridle on the one that 
shakes its tail.” 

There was one rock, larger than the others, and of 
all the rocks that the children had seen, this was the 
only one that split into layers. Wide slabs of this rock 


66 


ELLA 


lay all around, and of these slabs they had made, the 
summer before, a little cottage. It stood up against 
the great rock, with a slab of granite for each wall and 
one for the roof. By patient hammering they had 
contrived to break out a place for a doorway and a 
window. It was so well built that it had stood bravely 
through all the frosts and storms of a mountain 
winter. 

“It looks just exactly as it did,” Ella said delight¬ 
edly. “I was afraid it would fall down. I wonder that 
the ram did not knock it down.” 

Boy Cousin was silent. He was never inclined to 
brag of his own exploits. Ella went on: “Grandpa 
told me last night. He said that the ram kept trying 
to butt you, and that you hadn’t anything to fight it 
with except a little stick; but that you climbed up on 
this rock and managed somehow to keep it off till 
your father came from the next field. He said you 
were a plucky boy, or you would have been killed.” 

“Who wouldn’t be plucky rather than killed?” de¬ 
manded the hero of the story. “There’s no end of 
checkerberries over there. Let’s make a birch-bark 
basket and pick some.” 

They pulled some birch bark from a tree, took a 
piece seven or eight inches long and five wide, cut two 
slits an inch long in each end, bent the outer pieces on 
either end together, and fastened them with a little 
wooden pin; and there they had a strong basket that 
would hold a double handful of checkerberries. 


BOY COUSIN 


67 


After the berries were picked, Boy Cousin looked 
wisely at the sun and declared that it was time to go 
home to dinner. 

“Let’s go fishing after dinner,” Ella proposed. 

“No good; too early. Let’s play croquet first.” 

“You haven’t any croquet set.” 

“Haven’t I, though? You just come and see.” 

“You didn’t have last summer.” 

“This is another summer.” 

“Have you really a set?” 

“You said I hadn’t.” 

“ Well, I’ll say you have if you have. Where is it? ” 

“It’s where little girls can’t find it; but if you’ll 
come down this afternoon, we’ll play and I’ll beat you 
with it whether it’s real or not.” 

“I don’t more than half believe it’s real, but I’ll 
come. Good-bye.” 

When Ella came to see the croquet set, she thought 
it was quite wonderful. 

“It isn’t the least bit like those in the stores,” she 
explained to her mother. “ It is ever and ever so much 
nicer because it is so different. He just sawed off 
pieces of white birch for the mallet heads, bored a 
hole in each one, and drove the handle in. The bark is 
left on, and it’s so much prettier than paint and var¬ 
nish. The ends are not much smoothed off, and so the 
balls do not slip half so badly.” 

“And how did he make the balls?” asked the 
mother. 


68 


ELLA 


“Why, he didn’t have to make them at all. There 
was an old bedstead, and these balls were at the top of 
the posts. He just sawed them off. They’re not like 
common balls; they are shaped like those that boys 
play football with, and when you hit one, you never 
know which way it will go. It’s ever so much more 
fun than just plain croquet.” 

There was always plenty of amusement for the two 
children, and no one ever heard them saying, “Please 
tell me something to do.” No one ever heard them 
wishing for more children to play with. Indeed, the 
river was as good as a dozen. They cut poles in the 
woods and fished in it. Ella kept a little diary, as was 
the fashion in those times, and it was a great conven¬ 
ience to be able to fill a whole day’s space with such 
entries as, “I caught 2 flatfish and 1 perch”; or, when 
apparently the fish had refused to bite on the previ¬ 
ous day, “We did not go fishing to-day at all. I sup¬ 
pose I should not have caught anything if we had 
gone.” 

The river had a charming way of suggesting things 
to do. In one place, clay stones had formed, and the 
children had fine times wading in and picking them 
up. In another it had overflowed and made a little 
bay that could easily be shut off by itself. They 
named it Beauty Bay, and whenever they caught a 
fish without harming it, they slipped it gently into 
this Bay to live in peace and plenty all the rest of its 
life. 


BOY COUSIN 


69 


A big flat rock in the middle of the stream was their 
picnic ground. Here they often built a fire and roasted 
eggs rolled in wet paper or ears of fresh green corn. 
On the bank just beyond the rock were blackberry 
bushes, and no one w ho has not tried it has any idea 
how good the berries taste when one takes first a berry 
and then a bite of maple sugar. 

It must have been the river that suggested to them 
to write a library of little story-books, the “Bearcamp 
Books,” as they called them, one for each rock; and 
as the bed of the Bearcamp is all rocks, this was 
without doubt the most tremendous literary un¬ 
dertaking of the century. The stories were carefully 
modeled upon the tales of the day, and were written, 
like those in Concord, in tiny booklets. 

This is the way Ella described their publishing 
house to her uncle in the West: 

How do you like being editor? Boy Cousin and I are 
publishing books (on a rather smaller scale than you, 
though). We make a little blankbook out of writing paper 
and then make up a story and write in it. I have written 8 
or 9 books, little and big, besides a lot of other stories not in 
the book form. I love to write. I wish that when you write 
to me you would tell me all about your paper, and about 
the printing of it especially, as I never saw any one print. 
Boy Cousin can write poetry, but I can’t. 

The first story that Ella contributed to the “Bear¬ 
camp Library” w T as called “Our Ragbag,” for this 
was in the days when people saved their rags and 
bought glass dishes with them, and it read as follows: 


70 


ELLA 


As the contents of our ragbag were to be sold, the rags 
were laid on a table in an unused room. Well, this is pleas¬ 
ant, to be in the light once more after being in this dark bag 
so many long weeks. “What shall we do” said a piece of 
cloth. “Let us each tell our story ” said a piece of brocade, 
“I will begin — In a beautiful garden in the far off east, a 
no less beautiful girl used to walk — sometimes alone — 
but more frequently accompanied by her — enough of this 
stuff” said a white cotton rag “Let me tell a story, Once 
there grew in the south, a beautiful flower known as the cot¬ 
ton plant. I was that beautiful flower. Nonsense, just as 
though we would believe that story, said a little piece of 
blue & white muslin “let me tell mine Once there was a 
very rich lady came in her carriage to the shop where I was 
placed to be sold & without alighting from her carriage 
asked to see some rich silk & velvet goods, they were im¬ 
mediately carried to her & by mistake I was put in with 
them & the clerk did not perceive that I was there until 
he got to the carriage, he was just going to throw me into 
the store when the lady said “That is very pretty, I will 
take it” & so she carried me home with her then I was 
made into a splendid dress for one of— “Well, I say for 
one said a faded piece of calico, that we have heard enough 
about dress.” “The people are coming to pick us over, isn’t 
it too bad that we did not find out in the bag what a good 
time we might have had, each could then have told his 
story.” 


CHAPTER VIII 
RAINY DAYS AND SUNDAYS 


Every day was full, but rainy days were fullest of all. 
Those were the times when the children made fiddles 
of cornstalks, popguns of elder, and candles of bay- 
berry wax, using elder stems for moulds; the times 
when they played in the big unfinished garret where 
two or three barrels of beautifully lumpy maple sugar 
always stood. Boy Cousin’s mother had a loom and 
kept up the old custom of weaving one piece every 
year. The threads of the warp were all drawn into the 
harness and the piece was well begun when Ella came, 
and she thought it would be the easiest thing in the 
world to give the shuttle the skillful little push that 
sent it sliding across the threads. “Please mayn’t I 
try it only once?” she begged. “I’m almost sure I 
could make it go through just as you do”; and finally 
Boy Cousin’s good-natured mother let her try it. The 
shuttle must have been bewitched, for although Ella 
was certain that she started it in exactly the same way 
that it had been trained to go, it was willing to go 
anywhere and everywhere rather than to the one 
proper place. It fell down on the floor and slid away 
back under the loom. 

But if Ella could not weave, she could fill quills. 
These quills were short pieces of the hollow elder 


72 


ELLA 


stem with the pith pushed out. The thread of the 
woof was wound on them and they were slipped into 
the shuttle. To wind these, the “quilling wheel” was 
used. It was much like a spinning wheel, only smaller. 
The children took turns in using it, making believe 
that they were waging war with the fairy king of the 
elder bushes, and that the spools were prisoners whom 
they had taken and were binding with chains. 

Rainy days were good times to try whatever new 
ways they had learned of “taking it off” in cat’s- 
cradle, good times to braid bulrushes. They learned 
how to make three-strand and seven-strand and how 
to sew the braid together and make quite respectable 
hats. 

Painting was always in order. They manufactured 
a very good red paint from the juice of the elderberry; 
and when they wanted purple, they added a little soft 
soap. For other colors there was Ella’s paint-box to 
depend upon; for long before this she had had a new 
box to take the place of the one buried among the 
roses. 

They made various games, but this was not with¬ 
out its difficulties. Cardboard was at least ten miles 
away; birch bark would curl up; but no lack of mate¬ 
rials was ever allowed to interfere with their plans, 
there was always something else that would answer 
the purpose. In this case they pasted several thick¬ 
nesses of newspaper together, deceived the world by 
adding a facing of light brown wrapping paper when 


RAINY DAYS AND SUNDAYS 


73 


the white gave out; put the cards under flatirons to 
make as sure as possible that they would dry without 
wrinkles; and when they were dry, painted them with 
whatever the games required of words or pictures. It 
must be admitted that when these cards were shuffled, 
they were a little like the croquet balls in that no 
one ever knew which way they would go, and Boy 
Cousin’s father suggested that they be dealt with a 
snowshovel; but the children looked upon them as 
a great success. 

If there was ever a minute when they had nothing 
else to do, the yellow-covered Farmer’s Almanac was 
ready to keep them busy. Here were the riddles and 
conundrums and charades and enigmas of the preced¬ 
ing year, and a new collection for them to puzzle over, 
whose answers would not be revealed until the follow¬ 
ing year. There were bits of poetry and wise sayings 
of famous men. Here was occupation enough for 
many rainy days. Ella felt a little envy of Boy Cousin 
because he had the Almanac the first of January and 
she did not see it until July or August. Queerly 
enough, it was so associated in her mind with rainy 
days in the New Hampshire garret that she never 
thought of looking for a copy anywhere else. 

Sometimes the rain fell heavily all day, and even 
more heavily up in the mountains at the source of the 
river. This meant that the water would roll down 
faster and faster. The big meadow was only a little 
above the river’s level, and before the afternoon was 


74 


ELLA 


half gone, it would be a wide-spreading sea. Higher 
and higher the water rose under the bridge. Not a 
rock was to be seen. The whole meadow and the bed 
of the river was full of a torrent of black water, 
foaming and bubbling. 

After one of these rainy days, the children went out 
to see what harm had been done, and they found that 
Beauty Bay was gone, that even the water had been 
washed away, and the Bay had become a part of the 
river. The fish that had dwelt in such comfort in the 
Bay would now have to make their own living as best 
they could, for they had been swept into the river, 
into the pond, perhaps all the way to the briny ocean, 
and what would a fresh-water fish do then, poor 
thing? 

In the midst of all the happy occupations of week¬ 
days came Sunday with a dull thud. Everything 
stopped, everything was different. No more tramping 
shoes and runabout dresses; people must wear their 
best clothes to meeting. The little white meeting¬ 
house was several miles away, and the two extra pas¬ 
sengers made extra weight; they must drive slowly. 
No one could count upon the exact minute of arrival, 
and sometimes there were what seemed to Ella whole 
hours of waiting before they went into the church. 

The Sunday after the flood they started earlier 
than usual, for the roads might have been washed by 
the rain. They proved to be in good condition, and 
the time of waiting was longer than ever. This was 


RAINY DAYS AND SUNDAYS 


75 


very pleasant for the older folk. They met their 
friends and had nice little chats with them; but it 
happened that most of the children lived quite a long 
distance from Ella’s grandfather’s, and she did not 
know them. There was an attractive little road that 
rambled away from one side of the church, and she 
wished that she might ramble with it. Over the hill 
there would surely be a brook. Cardinal flowers grew 
beside brooks. It was not their season, but there 
might be just one. Any way, there would certainly be 
some kind of wild flowers. But the minister was 
coming and they must go into church. 

After the service came the Sunday school, and then 
people went out into the little graveyard and ate the 
lunch that they had brought with them. When Ella 
first saw this, she was a little surprised to see people 
treat a graveyard in so familiar and friendly a fashion. 
Then she remembered a strange story that she had 
once read about a little girl who had been carried to 
fairyland. She was allowed to see her old friends once 
every year, provided not one of them forgot to come 
to the place of meeting. 

Ella wondered if the people who lay in this grave¬ 
yard were pleased to have them come and eat lunch 
there. If they were, she was very glad to help make 
them happy. The afternoon sermon did not seem 
nearly so long as that of the morning, and she went 
home thinking that if the people under the stones 
really liked to see her, she should like to come again. 


76 


ELLA 


She even hoped it would not be so rainy the next Sun¬ 
day that she would have to disappoint them. 

Sunday was divided into three parts. It was very 
much Sunday until they were at home from meeting. 
Then it was allowable to put on a dress that was not a 
really best one, but was a little better than one for 
everyday. Dinner was at about four o’clock. After 
this came the third part of the day. It was not proper 
to play games, but one might pop corn. One might go 
to walk, not on a real tramp through the woods, but 
quietly up or down the road. 

Ella was never quite sure that she understood all 
the Sunday distinctions. For instance, one might 
pick berries in the garden, but it would never have 
done to take a pail and go to pick them in the fields. 
If you were walking on the road and came to a bush 
full of them, you might fold up a big leaf or make a 
birch-bark basket — a very simple one, of course — 
and fill it to carry home. Even then, however, it was 
better to explain that the sky looked like rain and the 
berries would have been spoiled and so w T asted before 
morning if left on the bush. 

After dinner on the Sunday after the flood, Ella and 
Boy Cousin went sedately up the road for a little 
walk. They came to a tree of early apples, which 
proved to be as sour as apples could possibly be. 

“That tree ought to be grafted,” said Boy Cousin. 

“How do you graft?” Ella asked. 

“You stick into the sour tree some twigs from a 


RAINY DAYS AND SUNDAYS 


77 


good tree and put wax around them to keep them 
dry,” replied Boy Cousin. 

“Let’s stick one into this tree.” 

“Why isn’t that work just as much as ploughing 
would be?” Boy Cousin queried. 

“Trees grow Sunday just as much as on other days, 
and if we graft them so they can raise good apples in¬ 
stead of poor, we are not working; we are only helping 
them to do their own work well. We haven’t any wax, 
but why can’t we get some spruce gum? That would 
keep the water out.” 

“There isn’t a good apple tree anywhere near.” 

“Put in a raspberry twig then,” suggested Ella. 
“A raspberry as big as an apple would be good, I 
know.” 

So they began, and before they were done, not only 
raspberry, but also maple, spruce, woodbine, wild 
cherry, and even hardhack had been grafted into 
that long-suffering tree. 

Monday morning Boy Cousin, his father, and Ella 
were going part way up one of the mountains to visit a 
pasture. In the spring, as soon as the grass was green, 
it was the custom to drive cattle and young colts up to 
a mountain pasture, where they could feed till au¬ 
tumn. Every few weeks the owner paid a visit to the 
pasture to make sure that his “creatures” were safe 
and to give them salt. 

They started when the mists were rolling away 
from the valleys, and the sun was just peering over 


78 


ELLA 


Ossipee. It was a beautiful ride through the cool 
fresh woods, showing here and there a spray of scarlet 
leaves. Occasionally they had a glimpse of a rabbit or 
a woodchuck, and once a deer watched them for a 
moment, then bounded gracefully across the road and 
disappeared in the woods. 

At the foot of the mountain the little company 
started up the narrow footpath, at first smooth, then 
stony, as they came to places where the rain had 
washed the soil. Most of the way was through the 
woods, but here and there were openings where they 
could get views of the mountains around them. From 
one of these openings they could see the old home¬ 
stead half hidden by its great maples. 

At last they came to a large pasture surrounded by 
woods. Boy Cousin’s father laid some salt on a big 
flat rock, and then called, “Hoo! Hoo! Hoo!” For a 
minute all was still, then a crash of broken limbs was 
heard far off in the woods. Then two or three cattle 
plunged headlong out of the forest. Then came others, 
and then four little colts. They knew that the visit 
meant salt, and every one started for the flat rock. 
But every one stopped short, and stood as still as a 
statue and gazed at Ella. It was almost embarrassing, 
for when she walked to one side, they all walked after 
her and gazed more curiously than ever. They had 
seen men before, but how a little girl could come into 
their pasture, and what a little girl might be, was a 
wonder. The shy little colts were so devoured with 


RAINY DAYS AND SUNDAYS 


79 


curiosity that they stood still and stared when Ella 
ventured to slip up and pat their silky heads. Then 
they went to the salt; and after they had eaten what 
they wanted, they wandered back, one by one, into 
the forest, and Boy Cousin’s father and the children 
set out for home. 

“Good-bye,” called Boy Cousin, as Ella climbed 
out over the high wheel. “We’ll go and see how our 
grafts are the first thing in the morning.” 

But when Ella opened the door, there stood the 
mother before the trunk, folding up their clothes and 
laying them in. The mail had brought a letter that 
made it necessary for them to return to the city in the 
morning. There was no time to visit the tree; and 
this is why no one knows what happens when a rasp¬ 
berry twig is grafted into a sour apple tree on Sunday 
afternoon. 


CHAPTER IX 
BOOKS AND PLAY 

The mother had agreed to take charge of a private 
school in the city for a year; and before many days 
had passed, Ella was setting out every morning at 
eight o’clock to practice an hour before school opened. 
It was a pleasant walk down the broad street. It had 
been a street of homes with flower gardens and trees 
and wide front steps, and porches that looked as if 
people liked to sit in them summer evenings and talk 
and have good times together. The gardens were full 
of old-fashioned flowers that bloomed as if they were 
having the best time of their lives. Between them and 
the sidewalk were fences so low and open that they in¬ 
vited passers-by to stop and see the roses, geraniums, 
hollyhocks, ladies’-delights, or none-so-pretties, sweet 
Mary, sweet William, and the rest of them. 

The street was just beginning to think of becoming 
a business street, and here and there, wherever there 
chanced to be a spare nook or corner, there stood a 
tiny store which seemed to look up a little shyly to its 
more stately neighbors. 

Two of these little stores were of special interest to 
Ella. One had a stock of roots and herbs, and among 
them were the cinnamon buds that she was still fond 
of. Her first spare penny went into the hands of a 


BOOKS AND PLAY 


81 


clerk in this store, a solemn-looking man with a pasty 
white face. Evidently he felt it his duty to give this 
reckless small child a lecture, for, still holding the 
penny in his hand, he told her how dangerous it was 
to eat spices. 

“I once knew a man who ate a pound of spice and 
died,” he said gloomily. 

“How much are these a pound?” Ella asked. 

“Forty cents,” the clerk replied. 

“Then,” said Ella, “if I buy a cent’s worth each 
time, I shouldn’t have had a pound till I had been 
here thirty-nine times more, should I?” 

“No,” said the clerk wonderingly. 

“I’ll be careful,” said Ella blithely. “I’ll keep 
count, and when I get to thirty-nine, I’ll stop — and 
then pretty soon I’ll begin over. Will you please give 
me the first pennyworth now?” — and he did. 

The other store held a supply of handkerchiefs, 
neckties, suspenders, stockings, and whatever other 
small wares men might want to buy. It was presided 
over by a trim little old gentleman with the whitest of 
linen and the reddest of cheeks. He was sometimes 
standing in the doorway when she went by, and one 
morning he held a letter in his hand. Ella would have 
offered to take it, but she was too shy. Perhaps the 
little old gentleman was a bit shy, also, for he hesi¬ 
tated until she was almost past. 

Then he said, “Should you be willing to leave this 
in the post-office as you go by?” 


82 


ELLA 


“I’d like to ever so much,” replied Ella cordially; 
and ever after that, when she passed the store and the 
little gentleman was in sight, they exchanged smiles 
and good-mornings. 

“I hope you were very careful of the letter,” said 
the mother when she heard the story. 

“Barnum’s elephants couldn’t have pulled it 
away from me,” Ella declared stoutly. She had just 
been to Barnum’s circus, so of course she knew that 
whereof she spoke. 

This was a school for “Young Ladies.” Ella did so 
wish that there was just one little girl among the pu¬ 
pils. However, she was used to being with older girls, 
and she was soon quite at home among these. Her 
studies were arithmetic, which she liked, and French 
and music, which she did not like. 

“Why do you like arithmetic best?” the mother 
once asked. 

“Because,” replied Ella thoughtfully, “when it’s 
done, it’s done, and I know it’s done, and it can’t 
come undone. In music, even if I have practiced my 
very best, I may strike some wrong note and spoil it 
all; and in French, I may forget just one word for 
just one minute, and then the whole sentence isn’t 
good for anything at all. Arithmetic is easy. It’s just 
add, subtract, multiply, and divide; and then you 
know it all. The rest is only different ways of using 
these things. A baby ought to know how to learn 
four things.” 


BOOKS AND PLAY 


83 


These were what Ella called her real “studies”; but 
there were two others that she called her “make- 
believe studies.” These latter she had chosen herself 
according to the color of the covers of the textbook 
and the size of the print. The tiny geography was 
yellow, with coarse print, and easy questions. The 
little grammar had a bright pink cover. It was not 
much larger than her own hand, and it was so clear 
and easy that Ella felt almost as if she had written it 
herself. Who could help understanding when an illus¬ 
tration was “George had four sweet apples,” or “Wil¬ 
liam’s dog has come home”? Of course, like all pro¬ 
ductions of grown-ups, it had occasional lapses, such 
as, “The gay summer droops into pallid autumn,” 
which of course no child ought to be expected to 
understand. 

These two books were so winning that Ella took 
great pleasure in saying every day or two, “I have 
learned my geography lesson,” or “I have finished 
my grammar. May I recite it now?” There was 
another reason, which she did not realize, but which 
was a strong one. She knew that little girls in the 
public schools did not study French and did study 
geography and grammar; and she was beginning to 
want to do things just like other girls. 

Ella had one great advantage over most little girls, 
and this was in her mother’s belief that if a child 
wanted to do what older people were doing, she ought 
to have a chance to try. “She will learn something,” 


84 


ELLA 


the busy mother always sard, “and whatever she 
learns will come in play some time.” That was why, 
when the mother and her friend were making wax 
flowers, Ella was encouraged to see what she could do. 
She had really acquired considerable skill. These or¬ 
naments were as fashionable as ever, and the other 
“young ladies” were so glad to follow her instruc¬ 
tions that she began to feel quite like an assistant 
teacher. 

She used her skill in making a bouquet for her 
special little girl friend at the old home, the one who 
had sent her the “jockey cap” at Christmas. Such a 
bouquet as it was! Ella wrote in her diary, “There 
were in it one Moss-rose bud a spiderworth a jonquil, 
some lily’s of the valley and a bunch of coral Honey¬ 
suckle two Prickly pears some forgetmenots a bunch 
of Verbena’s and two Orange-blossoms with two Haw¬ 
thorn’s and some grass with two Sweet peas were the 
contents of my bouquet.” It is little wonder that they 
did not dwell together in unity and that some of them 
were broken when the time of unpacking arrived. 

Ella also gave reading lessons. The mother had be¬ 
come interested in her washerwoman, a negress who 
had once been a slave. The woman was eager to learn, 
and Ella used to stop three times a week on her way 
home from school to hear her read and, incidentally, 
to study the little granddaughter and wonder if there 
was not some way to make her hair straight and her 
face white . 1 


BOOKS AND PLAY 


85 


Ella was usually a very happy little girl, but one 
day, in pessimistic mood she wrote in her little diary, 
in as large letters as the narrow space between the 
lines would permit, “I wish I did not have to do any¬ 
thing but read and play all day long”; but certainly 
she did a rather large amount of both reading and 
playing. 

As to the reading, there was the library of many 
volumes at home. There was the Sunday school col¬ 
lection; and its records of one rainy Sunday declare 
that by some method of persuasion she wheedled the 
young librarian into allowing her to carry home four 
books for the afternoon’s consumption. Then, too, in 
the same building as the school there was a large 
library, open to the public on payment of one dollar 
a year, and from this, she might carry home a book 
every day if she chose. No one interfered with her 
taking whatever she wished, and she usually wan¬ 
dered about among the bookcases and selected for 
herself. One day, however, the kindly old librarian 
heard a child’s voice asking, 

“Will you please help me to get a book? I can’t find 
what I want.” 

He peered over the top of his tall desk, and there 
stood a little girl in short skirts and a blue flannel 
blouse with brass buttons, looking up at him 
expectantly. 

“Certainly,” he replied, smiling down upon her. 
“How should you like one of the Rollo books?” 


86 


ELLA 


“I’ve read them all, most of them twice, and some 
of them three times.” 

“What kind of book should you like?” 

“I’d like a book about the Spanish Inquisition,” 
she declared serenely. 

“What!” exclaimed the good man. “That’s not 
the kind of book for a little girl to read. What made 
you think of that?” 

“I read ‘The Pit and the Pendulum,’ and it said 
the story happened in the Spanish Inquisition. I want 
to know what it is and I want to read some more 
stories about it.” 

The gray-haired librarian was aghast, but by no 
means unwise. He brought her a book about the In¬ 
quisition, a big book, a heavy book, a dismal book, in 
the finest of print and with two columns to the page. 
No sensible child would dream of reading such a book, 
and the shrewd old librarian knew it. 

One of the constant readers in this library was an 
old friend of the librarian, a quaint little gentleman 
who wore long hair curling at the ends, knee breeches, 
and shoes with big buckles. The librarian must have 
told him of the little girl’s request, for when she came 
again, he talked with her about the books that she had 
read and advised her to read Plutarch’s “Lives.” 
He was not so canny as the librarian, for this book, 
too, was in fine print and pages of two columns, and 
the little girl never read it until she had become a big 
girl. And, alas, she never read the scholarly essay on 


BOOKS AND PLAY 


87 


the cacao tree which the learned Doctor in Concord 
had given her. She always felt guilty about this latter 
piece of neglect, and when — not through her fault — 
the pamphlet was lost, she was uneasily glad. 

The mother was sometimes a little troubled be¬ 
cause Ella did not like to read history. 

“It is too hard for me,” objected the little girl. 

“But in that little history of yours, the words are 
not nearly so long as in ‘Robinson Crusoe,’ and you 
do not think that is hard,” said the mother. 

“No, but long words don’t make reading hard,” 
said Ella. “I like to think I’ve read half a line in just 
one word. It’s like the dissected map of the United 
States; it isn’t any harder to put in Texas than Rhode 
Island, and Texas is so big that when I have put it in, 
I feel as if I had really done something. Short words 
don’t make reading easy and long words don’t make 
it hard. I don’t know what it is, but somehow it’s the 
way they write it that makes it hard or easy. I’m 
going to know how to do it some time, and then 
I’ll write some hard books for children that shall be 
easy to read.” 

Ella was quite given to making lists of the books 
that she read, and often for a number of weeks in 
succession she read at the rate of a book a day. The 
following is one of her lists with her occasional com¬ 
ments : 

Up Hill, or Life in the Factory. 

Gulliver’s Travels. 


88 


ELLA 


Studies for Stories. 

Harry’s Vacation, or Philosophy at Home. 

Winifred Bertram. 

New School Dialogues. 

Hetty’s Hopes, or Trust in God. 

Romantic Belinda. 

Ruth Hall. 

Lewis, or the Bended Twig. 

True Stories of the Days of Washington. A very good book 
indeed. It tells about deeds of heroism and honor. I 
never read it before. Began it the 26 of December, 
finished it 27. 

Storybook by Hans Christian Andersen. Very good. 

Tim the Scissors Grinder. 

Atlantic Monthly. Andersonville Prisoners. 

Fighting Joe. 

Agnes Hopetoun’s Schools and Holidays. 

Curious Stories about Fairies and Other Funny People. 
Merry’s Museum. 

The Orphan Nieces. 

Neighbor Jackwood. 

Trials and Confessions of a Housekeeper. 

Summer in Scotland. 

Life of Josephine. 

Pilgrim’s Progress. 

Tales of the Saxons. 

Tanglewood Tales. 

Christmas Greens. A splendid story telling about two boys 
who went and got some evergreens and sold them and 
gave the money to their mother, who needed it very 
much, and so got on till they became great and good. 
The Young Crusoe. 

A Year after Marriage. 

Moral Tales. 

Poor and Proud. Splendid. 

Arabian Nights. 

Popular Tales from the Norse. 


BOOKS AND PLAY 


i 


89 


Out of Debt. Out of Danger. 

Peter Parley’s Stories. 

The Magic Ring. 

Curiosities of Natural History. 

Swiss Family Robinson. I have read it a great many times, 
but it is so good I wanted to read it again. 

Somehow, though one can hardly see how, the small 
girl contrived to get in a vast amount of play. Her 
special friend was a particularly nice boy who lived 
next door, indeed, nearer than next door, for the chil¬ 
dren persuaded the authorities of the two houses to slip 
off a board from the fence between. Beejay, as Ella 
called him, went to the public school, which had two 
sessions, while the “Private School for Young Ladies” 
had only one; so it was a little difficult to bring their 
leisure hours together; but they made the most of 
every minute. 

They played games without end, croquet, authors, 
the checkered game of life, the smashed-up locomo¬ 
tive — a locomotive with a bell-topped smokestack, 
a big bell, and a little whistle — dissected maps, 
and one game that they called “By a Lady,” since 
that legend alone was printed on the box. They made 
a very creditable ghost with the help of chalk and 
phosphorus, and were jubilant when a kindly older 
sister pretended to be badly scared by its horrors. 

Once upon a time they saved up their pennies till 
they had enough to buy a cocoanut; and such a cocoa- 
nut! It was the largest they had ever seen and cost 
no more than a small one! It was not shaped quite 


00 


ELLA 


like the cocoanuts that they had bought before, but 
the dealer told them to cut off the outside husk, and 
they would have a fine large nut within. 

No woman was ever so pleased with a bargain- 
counter purchase. They hurried down cellar and 
Beejay attacked the nut first with a knife, then with 
a hatchet. The mischievous thing rolled away from 
the blows into corner after corner as if it was be¬ 
witched. Ella had just been learning the “Song of 
the Brook,” and she quoted, 

“‘I slip, I slide, I gloom, I glance 
Among my skimming swallows ’ — 

Say, Beejay, do you suppose we shall ever have any 
‘swallows’? I should so like just one — of cocoanut 
milk.” Beejay attacked the puzzle more savagely 
than ever. The outer husk came off, and there lay the 
tiniest cocoanut that they had ever seen. It was no 
bigger than a child’s fist. Such was their great bar¬ 
gain. Such are the deceits of the world and the sellers 
of cocoanuts. 

“Sold!” said Beejay; “but let’s never, never tell.” 

“Indeed, we won’t,” declared Ella. “Cross my 
heart. We won’t have them all laughing at us. 
Mother said once cocoanuts were not good for me. 
Do you think one that size would make me very, very 
sick? Let’s eat it just as fast as we can and put the 
shell into the furnace, and no one will ever know.” No 
one ever did know, for the secret was faithfully kept. 

There was no end to the things the playmates did. 


BOOKS AND PLAY 


91 


They discovered a place where clay could be found, 
an agreeable variety of clay, not so hard as the clay- 
stones of the Bearcamp River, and not so soft as to 
be sticky, but just right to cut into silk winders, 

hearts and rounds, and boys and girls, like those that 

\ 

came out of cookie pans, and dozens of other things. 
They followed the directions of “The Boy’s Own 
Book” and made a boomerang that would not make 
the return trip; a battledore that was continually 
coming to pieces; a shuttlecock that never would go 
straight up, but always off to the farthest corner of 
the room. They pored over the minerals that the 
learned Doctor had given to Ella, and they had eager 
searches for fossils in a non-fossiliferous country. 

“The Boy’s Own Book” declared that glass would 
melt and that asbestus would not, although it looked 
like glass. A big brother told them of a ledge just out¬ 
side of the city where they could find asbestus. They 
packed some lunch into a little willow basket — the 
one that Ella always filled with firecrackers and pin- 
wheels a week before the Fourth of July, trying hard 
and with a vast expenditure of mental arithmetic to 
get as much noise and sparkle for her money as pos¬ 
sible — and off they went to the ledge. They found 
the asbestus and brought some home and put it into 
the kitchen stove. It did not melt; but neither did 
the piece of glass that they laid beside it. 

“Maybe it’s too thick,” Beejay suggested. “Let’s 
take some of the bird of paradise’s tail.” 


92 


ELLA 


The bird of paradise was a glass bird with a long tail 
of spun glass so bright and shining that it had not been 
thrown away when the bird broke into many pieces. 
This, too, they tried in the stove and also in the gas, 
but it would not melt. The children w r ere disgusted. 

“The boomerang wouldn’t boom,” declared Ella; 
“the battledore wouldn’t bat; the shuttlecock 
wouldn’t go one bit like either a shuttle or a cock; and 
now the glass won’t melt. Let’s just go on our own 
way and let the book alone. We can think of things 
enough to do. Let’s paint some autumn leaves. I’ll 
get my water colors and you get your crayons. You 
can use one and I’ll use the other, and we’ll see 
which will get done first.” 

But a voice called, “Ella, I want you to go down 
street on an errand.” 

It chanced that Beejay’s mother had also an errand 
at the same store; so the children went off together, 
swinging the little yellow basket between them. 

When they came home, they were running breath¬ 
lessly, and waving two handbills. 

“It’s at two o’clock this afternoon,” cried one. 

“And it’s only ten cents, and the man said it was 

almost always fifteen in other cities,” cried the other, 

“and that it was well worth twentv-five.” 

•/ 

“And it’s very educational, the man said it was.” 

The two mothers were easily persuaded to let them 
go to the panorama. They came home jubilant. 
There were no movies then, but they had seen pictures 


BOOKS AND PLAY 


93 


of the city of Venice with a marvelous number of gon¬ 
dolas, the sinking of the Alabama, the firemen of New 
York, Dr. Kane’s vessel that tried to get to the North 
Pole, and finally “a beautiful fairy scene,” as Ella 
declared. 

Surely, there was no need of help from “The Boy’s 
Own Book,” for on the way home the children had 
planned to manufacture a fleet of gondolas, and also 
an Alabama that, by the pulling of a string, would 
really sink. All this they would do without fail to¬ 
morrow; but “to-morrow” was another day, and 
when it arrived, a little girl with a hot red face, a sore 
throat, a headache and a backache was tossing about 
in bed. Ella had the measles. 

Never did mind cure have a fairer trial. She did 
not have a knotted string and repeat over and over, 
“Every day in every way I am getting better and 
better”; but she began at the very foundation, and 
when the red spots appeared, she declared: 

“It isn’t measles. I won’t have measles. The hall 
was hot and it made my face burn when I was there, 
and it just kept on burning”; but the longer she said 
it was not measles, the faster the red spots came out. 

“It isn’t fair,” she wailed. “It isn’t the least bit 
fair that I should have measles when Beejay hasn’t. 
We have so many things to do, I can’t be sick.” 

But the red spots grew brighter and brighter. It 
was only two weeks before the end of the school year, 
and Ella had had her last day in the “Private School 
for Young Ladies.” 


CHAPTER X 
LIKE OTHER GIRLS 


There was something that Ella wanted even more 
than she had wanted the box of tin soldiers or the ride 
in a swan boat, and this was that she might go to the 
public school. It was quite the custom for a public 
school girl to invite a younger child to go with her for 
half a day. If the child behaved well, the teacher 
made no objection, and perhaps gave her a book of 
pictures to look at. If her notions of order were not 
quite up to the mark, the teacher would draw the 
little hostess aside and say: 

“I don’t believe you’d better bring her again till 
she is older. She is rather too young to have to keep 
quiet so long.” 

Oddly enough, it had happened that Ella had never 
visited the public school, and all the glory of some¬ 
thing unknown was about it. Of course she had heard 
many school stories from her playmates. She knew 
that it was carried on in a businesslike fashion, that 
children did not choose their books by the color of the 
covers or recite what they pleased and when they 
pleased, and go home whenever they liked; but that 
lessons had to be learned, and had to be recited when 
the time for recitation had come. She knew that once 
in a while the superintendent of schools came to 


LIKE OTHER GIRLS 


95 


examine the pupils, and that he listened to their an¬ 
swers as if whether they were right or wrong was really 
an important matter. One day, after his kindly ex¬ 
amination of a class in which were several of Ella’s 
playmates, they came home at noon in great glee. 
After his examination, he had said to the teacher — 
but quite loud enough for the whole room to hear, 

“The children in your class have done so well that 
I am going to ask you if you won’t take them out to 
the grove this afternoon for a little picnic.” 

They had asked the teacher if Ella might go with 
them, but she did not care to be responsible for any 
more children and had said no, the picnic was for the 
pupils only. 

Now Ella was free every afternoon and could have 
gone to a picnic six days in the week, if there had been 
one to go to; but somehow this was different, and the 
tears really came into her eyes that day when she 
thought of the whole class having such a good time 
from which she herself was shut out. Some of these 
same little picnickers envied her for coming home at 
one o’clock or even earlier; but nothing would have 
induced them to express such a thought. The city 
was very proud of her public schools. There was a 
general feeling that the work of private schools was 
not so good; and these little girls held their heads 
very high because they were parts of the great public 
school system. 

There were many other times when Ella felt a little 


96 


ELLA 


shut out of things. She played with the other children 
and went to their simple parties. They came to see 
her Saturday afternoons and she went to see them; 
but they were always speaking of little events in 
school that she knew nothing about. She did so wish 
that she could speak in such familiar fashion about 
the delight of “getting up head” and the mortification 
of losing a place in the class because a word was left 
out in a recitation. In Ella’s class of one, there was 
no head and no foot; and when the other children 
talked of such things, she felt dull and stupid and out 
of the magic circle. 

Everything about their schools was different. At 
recess, Ella slipped into the big library and read a 
story. They marched out into the yard for a blissful 
quarter of an hour of play. She thought it would be 
delightful to march out in line with her hands down at 
her sides, one little girl before her and another behind 
her. In short, Ella wanted to be “in things.” It 
never occurred to her to boast of studying French 
and Latin and of reciting with “young ladies” many 
years older than she. She wanted to be just like other 
little girls, to study just what they studied, and to do 
just what they did. She did not know what “con¬ 
ventional” meant, but that was what she wanted to 
be. 

Now the time had passed for which the mother had 
agreed to take charge of the “Private School for 
Young Ladies,” and she, too, was thinking about 


LIKE OTHER GIRLS 


97 


public schools, and wondering a little how the small 
daughter, who had gone on her own way as inde¬ 
pendently as if she was the only child in the world, 
would get on with walking between parallel lines and 
being bound to do just what other children were do¬ 
ing. There was no private school at hand that was at 
all promising, and it really was quite a dilemma. One 
day she asked Ella how she would like to go to the 
public school. 

“Ed rather go there than anywhere else in the 
whole world, except to Norway or Switzerland,” she 
exclaimed. “May I go? May I go really?” 

“We’ll think it over,” said the mother; and indeed 
it needed to be thought over. Here was a little girl al¬ 
most twelve years old. Other children of twelve had 
been in school seven years; but this child’s school life 
consisted thus far of one year with an hour a day of 
arithmetic and French, and the rest of the time spent 
out of doors with a big dog for company; of a year and 
a half more with the same studies and a few months of 
Latin, but with much freedom as to her coming and 
going, short sessions, and long play hours. 

She had, then, a smattering of French; she had read 
“Fables” in Latin; she had learned whatever chanced 
to strike her fancy in the yellow geography and the 
pink grammar; and she was far beyond her age in 
arithmetic. She could sketch fairly well, she could 
play on the piano as well as children of her age were 
expected to do; she could knit and crochet and do 


98 


ELLA 


almost anything with her hands; she could win the 
heart of cat or dog or bird; she could climb a moun¬ 
tain; and she had read many hundreds of books, rang¬ 
ing all the way from “Songs for Little Ones at Home” 
to a volume of the “Religions of the World,” which 
she had discovered in an attic and thought more in¬ 
teresting than the Sunday school “Question Book.” 
She had never been prepared for any school, and how 
would she stand with other children who had had 
seven years of regulation training? “Suppose that she 
was put into a class of children much younger than 
herself,” thought the mother. She could not have the 
child humiliated and unhappy. What was the best 
thing to do? 

Ella herself had been troubled all her life about 
her own ignorance. When she was only five, she had 
begged to go to school because the older children had 
assured her that she would grow up to be a dunce — 
whatever that might be — if she did not go. Later, 
she would have been even more anxious if there had 
not been so many books to read and so many interest¬ 
ing things to do and to think about. Now when the 
mother asked, “What should you do if you were put 
into a class of little girls much younger than yourself? ” 
she had her answer all ready, “I’d study and study 
and study, till I knew so much they wouldn’t have me 
there, and they would have to put me up higher.” 

The mother concluded that the little girl would 
make her way, and the public school was decided 


i 


LIKE OTHER GIRLS 


99 


upon. She saw the principal of the school, and he 
said, “Send her down Monday morning, and we will 
see where she belongs.” 

When Monday morning came, Ella started for 
school at the same time with the other girls and 
walked down the same street with them. This in it¬ 
self was a delight. At last she was within the circle, 
and soon she would be able to talk about the mys¬ 
teries of school life as easily as they. 

She wore a cheery little red dress, a soft gray hat 
trimmed with a bit of black velvet and a red quill. 
She carried a rather large paper slate. It was made 
like a book and contained three sheets of firm stiff 
paper slated on both sides. This was the very latest 
thing in slates, and she was proud of it. She had one 
possession, however, that made her feel even more 
elegant than the slate, and that was her new slate 
pencil. Common slate pencils were hard and inclined 
to scratch. Ella’s was made of wood, soft and agree¬ 
able to the touch, and had “leads” of clay, which 
could be pushed up and down by moving a little peg 
in a groove, just as if it had been a pencil of solid gold. 
Ella dearly loved all things of the nature of tools 
or machines, and she had saved her money for many 
days to buy this pencil. Surely, such a choice article 
as this ought to give one courage. 

Cora was the oldest of the little group. There were 
six rooms in the school building, and she was in Num¬ 
ber Two, the next to the highest. As they drew near 


5 3 > 


100 


ELLA 


to the schoolhouse, Cora began to give the new pupil 
some good advice. 

“The principal thinks you don’t know anything if 
you can’t do examples,” she said, “and he’ll give you 
some awfully hard ones. Girls that come here from 
private schools don’t know very much, and you’ll 
probably be put in the Sixth Room. If you work 
hard, you can be promoted, maybe before the end of 
the year.” 

Ella began to feel so humble that she never thought 
of saying, “I can do cube root, and you are only in 
denominate numbers,” and they went silently up the 
stairs. 

“That’s the room,” said Cora. “That’s the princi¬ 
pal sitting at the large desk, and there is the assistant 
at the smaller one.” 

Ella wished that Cora would go in with her, but the 
older girl went off to her own room, and Ella stood on 
the threshold, a rather shy but exceedingly expectant 
little girl. Fortunately the assistant looked up and 
came to her. 

“This is Ella, I am sure,” she said. “I know your 
mother, and I am glad to have her little daughter in 
the school.” 

Then she introduced Ella to the principal. The 
girls and boys were all afraid of him, and when Ella 
looked fearlessly up into his face as if he was an old 
friend, and laid her hand in his, he really felt a little 
awkward. He was not used to being treated in that 
way by children. 


LIKE OTHER GIRLS 


101 


“After the opening exercises we will see what you 
can do/’ he said. He motioned her to a chair just be¬ 
yond the farther end of the platform, near that of the 
pleasant assistant, and Ella seated herself, so radi¬ 
antly happy that she had no dread of even the hard 
examples that were to come. 

She looked about the room. It had many windows, 
and it seemed to her enormously large. Blackboards 
ran around the four sides wherever the windows and 
doors would permit, and on these blackboards were 
maps and examples. Best of all, there were twenty- 
four desks — she counted them over and over — and 
at each desk sat two girls or two boys, as the case 
might be. 

None of them paid the least attention to her, for 
this was the highest class in the building. They would 
go to the high school in the spring, and what did they 
care about a small newcomer who might for all they 
knew, be condemned to the Sixth Room, or even be 
sent to the intermediate school a little way off? They 
were only two or three years older than Ella, but two 
or three years count for a great length of time when 
one is not yet twelve, and she looked at them with a 
deference that she had never felt for any grown-up. 
Grown-ups belonged to a queer world of their own. 
They had different notions and different ways of look¬ 
ing at things; but these boys and girls, venerable as 
they were by age and position, were nevertheless of 
her own world, and could be judged by standards that 
she could understand. 


102 


ELLA 


It is to be feared that Ella did not pay very close 
attention to the “opening exercises,” but older folk 
have sometimes paid no more, even though with much 
smaller temptation. 

But the assistant was beckoning to her and was 
handing her a paper. 

“Do these examples,” she said; “or as many of 
them as you can,” she added, for she, too, was of 
Cora’s opinion in regard to the children who came 
from private schools. 

The slate pencil that behaved like a gold one and 
the little girl who wielded it worked their way rather 
scornfully through addition, subtraction, multiplica¬ 
tion, and division. Then came fractions, decimals, 
compound numbers, interest, and square root; but 
now the principal and the assistant called a halt and 
held a conference. Ella heard snatches of their rather 
emphatic remarks. 

“She won’t be twelve for two weeks — altogether 
too young for this room.” 

“The Third Room would be only play for her.” 

“She has studied French and Latin,” said the as¬ 
sistant, “but she knows very little of geography 
and grammar.” 

“Never mind,” declared the principal decidedly. 
“If she can do arithmetic, she can do anything. Put 
her into the Second Room.” 


CHAPTER XI 

ELLA’S FIRST DAY IN THE PUBLIC SCHOOL 

The assistant led the way to the Second Room, and 
Ella followed, her heart beating triumphantly, for 
this was Cora’s room. She was introduced to the 
teacher, and the teacher gave her a seat at one of the 
double desks. Ella's face fell, for no one was sitting 
at the other half. 

“Ida is away to-day,” said the teacher, “but she 
will be here to-morrow, I think. I am sure that you 
will like her.” 

So her seatmate’s name was Ida! Could anything 
have been pleasanter? She made up her mind to write 
Ida of New Hampshire that very afternoon. But 
there wouldn’t be any afternoon; she would be in 
school from two until five. Never mind, there would 
be all the more to tell her. 

Across the room was Cora, who cast at Ella a look 
of surprise but of genuine welcome. The two seats 
were diagonally opposite, and when Ella studied 
mensuration, a little later, she always thought of the 
diagonal of a rectangle as the distance from Cora’s 
seat to hers. 

“The second class in geography,” the teacher 
called. 


104 


ELLA 


About half of the pupils in the room left their seats 
and took their stand at the back and around two sides 
of the room. This was to be Ella’s class, and to¬ 
morrow she would stand with them. To-morrow she 
could say, “My class.” Could anything be more de¬ 
lightful? 

The girl at the head raised her hand. The teacher 
nodded, and the girl said, “I have been at the head 
three recitations.” 

‘ Very well,” said the teacher, “then you may go to 
the foot,” and she walked down to the other end of 
the class. 

Ella thought this was rather unfair and that she 
ought to have been rewarded rather than sent to the 
foot. 

The teacher gave Ella a little yellow book of geo¬ 
graphical questions, and the new pupil followed the 
recitation with the keenest interest, for this was the 
first time that she had ever seen a class of boys and 
girls of her own age. 

The teacher nodded to the girl at the head of the 
class, and she began to recite: 

“There are ten Territories besides the District of 
Columbia, which is under the direct control of Con¬ 
gress.” 

“I wonder why it is,” thought Ella, “and what 
‘under the direct control’ means. Can’t it do any¬ 
thing without asking Congress? What does a District 
ever want to do?” 


FIRST DAY IN THE PUBLIC SCHOOL 105 


But the next girl was reciting. 

“The Territories and their capitals are, Washing¬ 
ton, Olympia, on Puget Sound.” And she went on 
through the whole ten more easily and rapidly than 
Ella thought she should ever be able to do. But what 
did it mean that hands were raised here and there all 
down the line? 

“Mary,” said the teacher to the girl below the one 
who had recited, “what is wrong?” 

“She said ‘Salt Lake City, on Great Salt Lake.’ It 
should be ‘near Great Salt Lake.’” 

“ Correct. Take your place,” the teacher said; and 
Mary took her place just above the girl who had 
failed, while she and all those that had stood between 
them moved down one place. 

“Frank,” said the teacher, and a boy who stood 
next went on: 

“The Gulf of Alaska and Kodiak Island are south 
of Alaska.” 

“The Columbia River separates Washington Ter¬ 
ritory from Oregon,” said the next; and the third 
recited: 

“It may be said of the animals of the Territories 
that immense herds of buffalo, deer, and horses roam 
over the prairies. Polar bears, wild goats, and sheep 
are found in the mountainous regions.” 

The little girl who had gone to the foot now waved 
her hand excitedly. 

“What is it, Alice?” 


106 


ELLA 


“He said ‘polar bears’; it should have been ‘grizzly 
bears.’” 

“Correct.” And Alice left the foot and moved in 
triumph down the side, across the end of the room, 
and up the other side until she was within four of the 
head. 

“It’s lovely! It’s just like a game,” thought Ella. 
“You have to know things, though, and know the 
questions as well as the answers. That’s funny. I 
don’t see why the teacher doesn’t ask them.” 

Suddenly the teacher did ask questions, a whole 
hailstorm of them, and they went all over North 
America. Ella was quite aghast when she saw how 
promptly they were answered and how few mistakes 
there were. These were some of the questions: 

“What are the principal capes in North America? 
What is the capital of Missouri? What bounds New 
Hampshire on the north? What are the principal 
manufactures of Connecticut? For what is Delaware 
noted? Name the western branches of the Mississippi. 
What States produce the most tobacco? What are 
the principal exports of British America? Where is 
Mazatlan?” 

She was still more aghast when the teacher said: 

“You did very well with the advance lesson, but 
not so well with the general questions. Remember 
that you are responsible for whatever you have once 
learned.” 

This was decidedly different from the comfortable 


FIRST DAY IN THE PUBLIC SCHOOL 107 


fashion of roaming about the tiny yellow geography 
to which Ella had been accustomed, learning a few 
“map questions” wherever she chose. 

The new pupil had heard one recitation and she felt 
quite wise in the customs of the school. She did not 
yet see why Alice was sent to the foot; but she had 
learned that lessons were short, but must be learned 
perfectly, and recited without questioning; that 
everything must be recited exactly right; that if it 
was not, you raised your hand and went above her; 
and that you were expected to remember everything 
you had ever learned. 

Ella tried hard to recall what she had ever learned 
that she was absolutely sure of, and the only thing 
she could call to mind on the instant was the multi¬ 
plication table — which she had never learned! 

The geography class was now dismissed, and the 
children took their seats. The roll was called for re¬ 
ports, and when it came to Alice, she reported, “One 
hundred, and also fifteen extra for being at the head 
three recitations.” Then Ella understood one thing 
more. If you could “get up head” and stay there 
three recitations, you went to the foot with fifteen 
extra and had a chance to get to the head again. The 
fifteen extra might be used perhaps to make up for 
some failure. She wished she knew. It wouldn’t be 
quite so dreadful to fail if there was only some way 
to make up. She did not want to ask any of the girls; 
she must ask Beejay. Then she remembered that 


108 


ELLA 


Beejay could not be asked, for he had gone away to a 
boarding-school for boys. He had been to the public 
school, and she wondered why he had never told her 
all of these interesting things. He went to another 
school, however, and maybe all schools were not so 
wonderful as this one. She would write to him and 
ask. 

Ella’s lessons were usually recited in a few minutes, 
but evidently more time was allowed for them in this 
school, for the children now took out their atlases and 
set to work to draw a map of Maine. Ella watched 
eagerly. The teacher noticed how interested she was 
and asked if she could draw maps. 

“I don’t know,” replied the little girl honestly. 
“I never tried; but I can draw flowers and old castles 
and dogs and cats.” 

“I will lend you an atlas,” said the teacher, “and 
you can try.” 

The teacher walked about the room, looking at the 
children’s work and showing them where they could 
make it better. Ella’s hands began to tremble, she 
did so hope that hers was as good as the others. The 
teacher stood watching her — for half an hour, it 
seemed to the little girl. Then she took up the paper 
and looked it over carefully. 

“That is exceedingly good,” she said as she laid it 
down. 

Ella was happy. The teacher had not said “ex¬ 
ceedingly” to any other boy or girl. 


FIRST DAY IN THE PUBLIC SCHOOL 109 


The short winter afternoon was fast coming to an 
end. For a few days before Christmas most of the 
schools were obliged to let the pupils go home at half¬ 
past four instead of five, unless there was gas in the 
building or it was a specially bright, sunny day. It 
was almost half-past four now, and the teacher said, 
“You may put away your books.” The children 
put some of them into their desks, and fastened the 
others together in a strap to carry home. Then they 
waited for the bell to strike. 

Now was coming the event to which Ella had so 
looked forward, the marching out in single file with 
her arms down at her sides and one girl walking in 
front of her and another behind her. But she was dis¬ 
appointed, for the teacher said, 

“Ella, if you will wait a few minutes after school 
closes, I will give you the list of the books that you 
will need.” 

When Ella went for her hat and coat, the children 
were all gone, and she had to walk home alone. She 
went by way of the bookstore, however, and it almost 
made up for her disappointment to be able to hand the 
slip of paper to the clerk and say with an air of being 
perfectly at ease — she had practiced her speech in a 
whisper all the way down the street — 

“Will you please give me the books on this list? 
They are for the Second Room in the grammar 
school.” 

The clerk smiled. Evidently he had seen little new 


110 


ELLA 


scholars before, and Ella went home with a written 
arithmetic and a mental arithmetic, an atlas and a 
little book of geographical questions, a spelling book, 
a Fifth Reader, a writing book, a red penholder, an 
impishly sharp little steel pen marked Gillott 303, 
just like the ones that she had used at the seminary. 
It was a heavy load, but the glory of it lessened the 
weight. She hurried up the street, eager to tell of her 
day’s experiences, and happy to think that, even if 
she had not marched out in the line, she was at least, 
and at last, within the circle. 


CHAPTER XII 
“FOOSLE” REMAINS 

In the morning, when Ella reached the head of the 
stairs on the second floor, there stood the principal. 
The little girl looked up at him in a friendly fashion 
and he said “Good morning,” and added, rather to 
his surprise, for he seldom talked with the children, 

“Do you like our school?” 

“Oh, I do! I do!” she exclaimed with enthusiasm. 
“I think it is just splendid.” 

At the other side of Ella’s desk sat a little girl in a 
blue dress with a dainty white apron trimmed with 
narrow edging. This was Ida. The teacher introduced 
the two children. Ida said, 

“Haven’t you been in the public school before?” 

“No,” answered Ella. 

“Did you go to a private school?” 

“Yes,” Ella replied rather unwillingly, for sud¬ 
denly, in view of the businesslike ways of the public 
school, all that she had done before began to seem very 
childish. “Before that, I went to a seminary.” 

“Did you really? I should think that would be 
splendid. I knew a girl once who went to a seminary, 
but she w r as old, as much as sixteen. Are you going to 
be in the Second Class?” 


ELLA 


112 

“Yes. I was here yesterday, and I heard the geog¬ 
raphy class.” 

“After the opening exercises,” said Ida, “the First 
Class recites in arithmetic, and then ours comes. I’ll 
show you where the lesson is, and you’ll have time to 
do the examples before we recite. But you haven’t 
covered your books yet!” 

Ella looked at Ida’s books and saw that every one 
was neatly covered with light brown paper; and again 
she felt out of the circle. 

“I’ll show you how at recess,” said Ida; and Ella 
was comforted, for in an hour and a half she would be 
“ in ” and like other girls. She noticed that Ida’s name 
was neatly written on the outside of her light brown 
covers, and that she had the prettiest capital I that 
Ella had ever seen. It began like all I’s, then at the 
line the pen moved away to the left in a handsome 
little horizontal loop that made quite a different thing 
of the letter from the common everyday I’s of other 
people. Ella determined to work till she could make 
one as good. She wished her name began with an I! 
Evidently her earthquake handwriting would not do 
for schoolbooks. Beejay’s older brother wrote beauti¬ 
fully; she would ask him to write on her books, and 
she would tell him about that handsome letter. 

The lesson in arithmetic consisted of ten examples 
in simple interest. Ella finished these in a little while, 
and supposed there was nothing more to be done; but 
when the class was called, she found that the scholars 


FO0SLE REMAINS 


113 


were sent to put their work on the blackboard, and 
were then to explain it in exactly the way given in the 
book. She had done the examples in a way that was 
easier, but was different; and she was out of it again. 
Oh, if she only could be just like other girls, she wailed 
mentally. 

So the morning went on. Ella was first “in,” then 
“out” again. The lesson in mental arithmetic was 
very easy, she thought, as she read the questions, but 
she never dreamed of learning them by heart. The 
teacher told the class to close their books, and then 
she read, 

“Bought a piano for $300, and 2/5 of the cost of the 
instrument was 4/3 of what I received of nine young 
ladies for its use one year; how much did each young 
lady pay for its use?” 

Ella was greatly taken aback. She could not recite 
the question with her book closed; and even if she 
had learned this one, could she learn such nonsense as 
the one that stood next to it, “3/4 of 2/3 of 70 are 
5/12 of 4 times what number?” She was afraid not, 
and for the first time she began to wonder if a school of 
boys and girls would really be so much pleasanter than 
a school of young ladies. She felt hopelessly disgraced 
when she had to say to the teacher, “I don’t know.” 

There was one more recitation before the school 
closed at noon, and that was grammar. The little 
store had been out of grammars, and therefore Ella 
had not been able to learn the lesson. The teacher 


114 


ELLA 


had told her that she might ask Ida anything that she 
wanted to know. The first thing she asked was why 
Ida’s grammar was pencil-marked with straight lines 
beside some of the paragraphs and not the rest. 

“Why, those marked are what we learn,” Ida re¬ 
plied. 

“What are the others about?” 

“I don’t know. No one ever reads those.” 

Ella’s little pink grammar at home began, 

“Do all nations use the same language?” and the 
answer was, 

“They do not.” 

This was easy and sensible, and about things that 
even very little girls could understand, but this new 
grammar began, 

“English grammar treats of the principles and 
usages of the English Language,” and went on to say 
that grammar was divided into four parts, “Orthog¬ 
raphy, Etymology, Syntax, and Prosody.” Her gram¬ 
mar at home declared that 

“A noun’s the name of anything, 

As school, or garden, hoop, or swing 

The new grammar remarked that “Letters cannot be 
too carefully distinguished from elementary sounds.” 
Ella wondered why. She had known letters ever since 
she could remember, and she had never confused 
them with elementary sounds — whatever elemen¬ 
tary sounds might be. How could things be so impor¬ 
tant when they were not? 


FOOSLE REMAINS 


115 


The class took their places around the room. Some¬ 
how there seemed to be more of them than when they 
were seated. Ella remembered days when she did not 
have to recite her French lesson because the young 
lady who was for a little while the rest of the class had 
failed to come. With all these boys and girls in the 
class, there would plainly be no such good fortune. 
There would be no hurrying to learn her lessons and 
then being excused to go home early, for classes came 
at just such times, and Ida had told her that if a pupil 
stayed away, or was excused, she would be marked 
zero for the lesson. 

Ella sat and listened while the class recited. She 
grew more and more discouraged with every recita¬ 
tion. Not one girl or boy asked a question as to the 
meaning of these queer statements. Ella supposed 
that was because they understood it all — and she 
did not. How could she ever go on with them? She 
was almost sorry that she had ever come to a public 
school. She was a plucky little girl, however, and 
when she went home at noon, she set to work bravely 
to learn her spelling lesson, and never a word did 
she say about the inferiority of public schools to 
private. 

Ida had told her that in the intermediate school the 
children had to learn the words of the spelling lesson 
in order and “put them out” to themselves, but that 
this was not done in the grammar school, and Ella 
was quite at ease about this lesson, for she could not 


116 


ELLA 


see how there could be anything “queer and cranky” 
in a recitation in spelling. There was not, and at the 
end of the lesson the teacher called the names for re¬ 
ports. Ella had often written in her little diary, when 
she could not think of anything else to say, “Had a 
perfect lesson, didn’t fail,” or “Didn’t have a very 
good lesson and the teacher was cross”; but to have 
her name called and have her report recorded in defi¬ 
nite figures in the big book that lay on the table — 
that was quite a different matter. She answered 
shyly but happily, “One hundred.” 

After the spelling came twenty minutes of writing; 
and now the little newcomer was in despair, for she 
knew just how poor her handwriting was. She knew 
that no two letters were of the same height or slanted 
the same way. She knew that it made her hand ache 
to write half a page, and she knew that the writing 
was hardly the least bit better since the seminary 
days. She opened the new copybook at the first page, 
and behold there was the old familiar sentence, 
“Honesty is the best policy,” printed in the fashion¬ 
able “Spencerian hand” with all its rounded flour¬ 
ishes. She had long ago tried her best to copy this 
very sentence and had failed. What would the 
teacher say? Perhaps the principal would even put 
her back into a lower room. 

The watchful teacher saw that something was going * 
wrong, and when she looked at the line or two that 
the little girl had written, she knew what it was. 


FOOSLE REMAINS 


117 


“Writing is a little hard for you, isn’t it,” she said, 
“just as arithmetic is hard for Alice?” The teacher 
was ahead of her times, and as she looked at the 
cramped little letters, she added: 

“Did you ever guess that you were making your 
fingers work too hard, while there was a good strong 
muscle here” — and she touched Ella’s forearm — 
“that would be glad to help them? Just let the mus¬ 
cle lie on the table in this way and try to make some 
curves like these,” and she gave her a slip of paper 
with a whole line of curves and loops. “Hold the pen 
so,” she continued, “but don’t hold it too tight. No 
one will try to take it away from you.” 

“Oh, I see! I see!” exclaimed Ella. “If that mus¬ 
cle is right and not rolled over on its side, the pen has 
to be right; it can't point the wrong way if it tries”; 
and she went to work on the impossible writing with 
fresh courage, for now she had a definite idea of what 
she was to do. 

The spelling and writing lasted from two until a 
quarter of three. Then came the geography and the 
reading. 

The geography lesson was a review of questions on 
the Central and Pacific States. Ella had been over 
and over these questions till she was sure that she 
could answer every one of them. She stood at the 
foot of the class of course as the newest arrival, and 
she never dreamed of going up any higher; but a boy 
who stood three above her recited: 


118 


ELLA 


“Iron and lead are found in Indiana, and the richest 
mines in the world are found in Michigan.” 

Not one pupil raised a hand. Those below the boy 
did not know that there was anything wrong, and 
those near the head had nothing to gain and were not 
watching so closely as they would have done if there 
had been a chance to move up. Very timidly Ella put 
up her hand. 

“What is it, Ella?” asked the teacher. 

“He should have said, ‘the richest copper mines in 
the world,’” she answered in a voice that trembled a 
little, for they were all looking at her. 

“That is right,” said the teacher. “Take your 
place,” and she moved up three places. She was so 
happy that she could hardly stand still. What a story 
she would have to tell the mother and to write to Boy 
Cousin, of going up three places the very first day! 

But even greater glory awaited her. The next pupil 
recited: 

“Kentucky is noted for foosle remains of animals 
and for its mammoth cave.” 

“What kind of remains?” asked the teacher, and 
the boy replied, 

“Foosle.” 

“The whole class may tell what that word is,” said 
the teacher, and there was a chorus of “Fossil.” 

“Can any one tell what a fossil is?” 

No one but Ella raised a hand. Her cheeks were 
still burning, but she answered bravely: 


FOOSLE REMAINS 


119 


“A fossil is what used to be a plant or an animal. 
It has turned into stone, and is dug up out of the 
ground.” 

“Excellent,” said the teacher. “It sounds as if 
you really knew fossils. Have you any of your own 
that you could bring to school to show us?” 

“Yes,” said Ella, remembering the Doctor’s gener¬ 
ous package of specimens. “I have some that were 
given me and two that I found.” 

It was too dark for the reading lesson. The school 
was dismissed, and Ella went home, her eyes spar¬ 
kling and her cheeks all aglow. She loved the public 
school. 


CHAPTER XIII 
THE TORIES’ ALPHABET 

Ella kept a diary because her mother wanted her to. 
It was not always easy for her to think of something 
to write in it, but now she had a new subject, “Get¬ 
ting up head.” If she planned carefully, she could 
make this subject serve her need for three days. For 
the first day she wrote, “I got up to the head of the 
class. After I have been there three recitations, I go 
to the foot and have fifteen extras.” For the second 
day she wrote, “I hope I can stay at the head of the 
class three recitations and then go to the foot and 
have fifteen extras.” For the third day she wrote, “I 
stayed at the head three recitations, then went to the 
foot to-day and now have fifteen extras.” It is small 
wonder that she awoke one morning saying over to 
herself: 

“I get up head We get up head 

Thou gettest up head You get up head 

He gets up head They get up head ” 

After two or three weeks, there was much talk 
about reports. The first one was coming at the end of 
her first month in the school, and Ella’s heart sank 
whenever she thought about it. She had been at the 
head a number of times, and thought she had had 


THE TORIES’ ALPHABET 


121 


more than enough extras to balance her few failures. 
Still, she had a feeling that something might come 
that would give her a low rank or might even put her 
into a lower room. 

The reports were to be given out on Friday. Thurs¬ 
day the principal came to the door and asked the 
teacher to send Ella to the office. Ella turned pale 
and her hands were cold. She had heard of severe 
scoldings and even worse that had taken place in that 
office. She did not know of anything that she had 
done, but there might be something. She wished she 
was back in the private school. Her fingers trembled 
as she knocked at the door. 

“Come in,” said the voice of the principal, and she 
went in. 

He said, “There is a matter about which I wish to 
speak to you, and perhaps it will not be necessary 
to see your mother.” 

This was worse and worse. 

“What could she have done,” thought the fright¬ 
ened little girl. 

The principal went on: 

“I have been looking over the reports of your room, 
and I find that yours is rather different from what I 
expected.” He paused a long moment. Then he went 
on: “You have done remarkably well, better than I 
thought you could possibly do in a new school with 
new studies and new ways. When you go home this 
noon, you may tell your mother what I have said. 


122 


ELLA 


And there is one thing more. Do you think you can 
keep this a secret, and not say a word to any one but 
your mother?” 

“Yes, sir, I will,” Ella declared with emphasis. 

It would have been simpler to send a note, but 
this principal liked to try experiments, and he did 
not always realize the sensitiveness of children. He 
thought it would be interesting to see of what kind 
of stuff this little girl was made, and whether the 
interview would be agreeable to her hardly entered 
his mind. 

“Good-bye,” he said, “and tell your mother you 
are doing finely.” 

The mother thought Ella was too young to skip a 
class, so she was not promoted. 

A week later, Ella met the principal in the hall, 
and he asked, “Did you tell any one besides your 
mother? ” 

He was pleased with the touch of indignation with 
which she replied, without deigning to say “No,” “I 
promised I wouldn’t.” 

Ella soon forgot the unpleasant part of this inter¬ 
view, and had a comfortable feeling that she and the 
principal had a secret together. When the other 
children blamed him, she always stood by him, and 
she was never afraid of him again. 

She was radiantly happy when the reports were 
given out, for hers read, “Scholarship, 91%, Rank in 
class, 3. Deportment, Excellent.” Below this, in the 


THE TORIES’ ALPHABET 


123 


space for remarks, the teacher had written, “Ella is 
studious and well behaved.” This pleased Ella very 
much. 

“You see,” she said to her mother, “she had to 
write percentage and rank, but she did not have to 
say anything in the ‘Remarks,’ so she must have done 
that because she really wanted to.” And she read the 
line over and over. 

Ella’s likes and dislikes were very strong. When 
she “left out what form and voice the verb ‘forbid’ 
was,” and so lost her place at the head, she wrote 
that she “didn’t like grammar at all.” In the middle 
of the term, when things were a little dull and mo¬ 
notonous, she wrote forlornly: 

“Nothing in particular happened to-day, as indeed 
nothing happens any day but to get up, dress, and 
start for school; then I study hard all day long and 
come home at night, go to studying again, and so on, 
the same old routine over and over again, till I am 
sure that I am thoroughly sick of it all.” 

The trouble was that the lessons had become so 
much easier that they no longer kept her fully oc¬ 
cupied, and she had time to find fault. 

However, if Ella did find life monotonous, her 
teacher did not. The first teacher was ill and out 
of school, and a much younger one had taken her 
place. 

This new teacher was rather too generous with 
“extras,” and her pupils soon found out that if they 


124 


ELLA 


behaved well four days in the week, they could pile 
up extras enough to make up for all the misdeeds 
that they could commit on the fifth. 

They were very systematic, these naughty chil¬ 
dren. Four days they behaved like little saints, study¬ 
ing quietly and never whispering; but when the fifth 
day had come, they wrote notes to one another, they 
whispered, they made paper dolls, they wriggled and 
they twisted. They manufactured excuses for walking 
about the room. How every child could need to go 
to the dictionary and the waste-basket at least once 
in five minutes was a mystery to the young teacher. 
She began to have a nervous dread of Fridays, for 
fear visitors might come and would report that her 
classes knew absolutely nothing and behaved exactly 
as they ought not; for many of her mischievous 
pupils carried their game so far as to do little study¬ 
ing for Fridays. 

Ella would never agree to this. Play and failures 
in class were two different things. It was fun to play, 
but it was a disgrace to fail. Besides, Friday’s les¬ 
son was always Monday’s review lesson, and, as she 
very sensibly reasoned, it was better to learn it and 
have it done with than to spoil Saturday by having to 
learn a double lesson for Monday. 

But she played, indeed she did, sheltered by a big 
open atlas. She made paper dolls and paper furniture, 
and she folded into boxes and rowboats and dustpans 
and Chinese junks the squares of paper that in after 



SHE PLAYED, INDEED SHE DID, SHELTERED BY 
A BIG OPEN ATLAS 


















THE TORIES’ ALPHABET 


125 


years were sacred to the stern labors of the kinder¬ 
garten. This bad child made a regular business ar¬ 
rangement with the little girl who sat in front of her. 
If, whenever Ella touched her right shoulder three 
times, she would sit up very straight and act as a sup¬ 
port for the open atlas, Ella would give her every 
week one paper doll, three fly boxes, and two Chinese 
junks. 

Of course the teacher could not help seeing part at 
least of what was being done “on the Potomac,” as in 
her own mind she called Ella’s desk; but she was 
really puzzled what to do, and none of her normal 
school notebooks gave her the least help. Ella played 
so quietly and recited her lessons so well — even on 
Fridays — that it was not easy to be severe with her. 
How could she be always finding fault with a child 
who was invariably respectful to her and who slipped 
up to the head of the class so easily, went to the foot 
with a store of extras numerous enough to provide for 
all emergencies, and in a day or two stood at the head 
again, ready to collect more extras? The term would 
soon be at an end, and she wisely concluded that she 
would not walk around to the rear of the atlas when 
she could avoid it. 

About this time came the revealing of the great 
secret. Ella and Ida still sat together. The paper 
dolls of each visited those of the other. They shared 
each other’s worsteds and bright-colored papers, and 
lent each other new patterns in crocheting and work- 


126 


ELLA 


ing on canvas and perforated paper. One day, as they 
were walking home together after school, Ida said to 
Ella, 

“We’re best friends, aren’t we?” 

“Of course we are,” declared Ella wonderingly. 
“Why?” 

“Because there’s a secret that we mustn’t tell to 
any one but our best friends. It’s the Tories’ Alpha- 
bet.” 

“What are ‘Tories’?” 

“I don’t know, but this is their alphabet. It’s just 
a name for it, I guess. A big girl in the First Room 
showed it to me, and told me never to let any one have 
it but my best friends. She said that another girl in a 
class before that gave it to her. It is an alphabet, and 
we can write notes with it, and no matter who finds 
one, it can’t be read.” 

“Can’t you show it to your mother?” 

“Yes. I showed it to mine after she promised not 
to tell any one about it; and you could show it to 
yours if she promised.” 

School was no longer monotonous. It was a kind 
of fairyland where all sorts of marvelous things were 
happening. Ella looked back with disdain upon her 
days at the seminary and even at the “Private 
School for Young Ladies.” If they had lasted all her 
life, there would never have been anything so thrilling 
as this. There was no doubt now that she was within 
the circle to stay. 


THE TORIES’ ALPHABET 127 

This is a true copy of the Tories’ Alphabet. 

A B C-D E a H 1 x! 

KLMtfOPQRST 
U.VUT X. 

V-HPqOCXX&bt 

cJxc a z>a,~ 

The sudden change that the revealing of this secret 
produced was a vast relief to the troubled mind of the 
teacher. There was no more making of dolls, no more 
folding of kindergarten papers. The tiny bottles of 
mucilage disappeared, and never once was a pair of 
scissors heard to fall upon the floor. Walk back of the 
atlas when you would, there was nothing to be seen — 
if you did not come too near — but writing books and 
scraps of paper whereupon a little girl with unusually 
poor handwriting was apparently trying her best in 
her spare time to improve it. 


128 


ELLA 


In their mysterious alphabet the two children wrote 
notes innumerable to each other, and even copied 
long poems, and they might easily have taken up an¬ 
other study in the time that they gave to it. The 
teacher knew of course that something was going on, 
but it was such a relief to have them even apparently 
at work that she did not open her eyes any wider than 
was absolutely necessary. 

The end of the second term was at hand, and those 
who stood well in the Second Room were to be pro¬ 
moted to the First Room. Ella was to go. It was an 
honor to be promoted, but when the reports were 
given out, she went home with a sober face and lag¬ 
ging steps. Her percentage was 90, and her stand in 
the class was Number One for the half term. The 
trouble was with the deportment. Much as the teacher 
liked her, she could not fairly give her an “Excellent.” 
The first half of the term was marked “Good,” and 
the second — which began about the time of the rev¬ 
elation of the secret — was “Very good.” But that 
was not “Excellent,” and the mother had told her 
that, although a child might not always be able to 
take a high stand in her class, she could always be 
“Excellent” in deportment. The time of reckoning 
had come. 

“Was there anything to prevent you from be¬ 
having well?” asked the mother. 

“I did behave well four days out of every five, and 
sometimes others,” Ella replied. “I might have been 


THE TORIES’ ALPHABET 


129 


a good deal worse. I might have had an ‘Unsatis¬ 
factory’ in deportment and in any one of the seven 
studies, or even in all of them, and I didn’t; I only 
had a ‘Very good’ in just one thing. I don’t think 
that was bad at all. Anyway, I couldn’t help it.” 

“Ella,” said the mother, “the doctors say that 
often when children seem to be naughty, it is because 
they are nervously tired and need more sleep. I think 
the thing to do will be for you to go to bed at eight 
o’clock every night for the next month. Then you will 
be rested enough to behave well when you go into the 
First Room.” 

Now one of the girls was to have a party during the 
next month, and two days of Beejay’s week’s vaca¬ 
tion came within its limits. Then, too, this punish¬ 
ment touched her pocketbook seriously. She had 
never had for a Sunday school teacher a milliner who 
would give her bits of ribbon, but she did have one at 
that moment who kept a pretty little fancy store. 
She was glad of all the mittens that Ella could cro¬ 
chet, and the little girl was becoming quite a capitalist 
on the proceeds. She had planned many nice things 
to do with the money that she expected to make; and 
now there would be no time for anything but her les¬ 
sons, and when the month was over, it would be too 
late for mittens. 

She had one big cry, then she accepted the situation. 
One comfort was that the “month” was February 
and that it was not leap year. Another was that when 


130 


ELLA 


the day came for her to move into the First Room, 
the young teacher forgot that she was a teacher and a 
graduate of the State normal school. She put her arm 
around the child and said, 

“Ella, if you only wouldn’t play quite so much, I 
would not ask for a better scholar — and anyway, 
play or no play, you are a dear little girl, and I wish 
you were my own small sister.” 


CHAPTER XIV 

AMONG THE “WELL-BEHAVED ANGELS” 

The class to be promoted met as usual in the Second 
Room, and with their books marched into the First 
Room. Besides the glory of the promotion, Ella’s 
dignity had another foundation, namely, that she 
was thoroughly up to date in her equipment. Her 
smoothly sliding slate pencil that worked like a gold 
one had not yet been surpassed by any new invention, 
but the large slate was quite behind the times. The 
proper thing now was to have what was apparently a 
book about the size of her arithmetic and grammar, 
but made up of four small slates, of real slate, but 
thin and light, and with slender wooden frames. The 
binding of Ella’s was of a bright, cheery shade of blue, 
and on the outside was printed in gilt, with a large 
Spencerian flourish, “Notes.” 

The slate was enough to give elegance to her outfit, 
but the crowning touch of distinction was her book- 
carrier. Bags had long before gone out of use, if in¬ 
deed they had ever been in use in that city. The in¬ 
formal court of school girls had decided some time 
before this that a strap buckled around a little pile 
of books would do very well for boys, but was not in 
the best taste for their sisters. Moreover, the strap 
jammed the edges of the books, and this was an argu- 


132 


ELLA 


ment against it which was not without force at home, 
for even in families of little education a schoolbook 
was an article to be tenderly cared for. 

Books were not provided by the city and showered 
into the hands of pupils to be used or abused accord¬ 
ing to disposition and home training, or lack of train¬ 
ing, and then tossed to the following class. They were 
to be bought, sometimes with self-denial on the part of 
children or their parents, to be neatly covered with 
light brown paper or sometimes with some well- 
wearing color of calico, and treated with respect. A 
new book was an acquisition, an article of value to 
have and to hold. Usually the child’s name and the 
date of its purchase were written on the flyleaf, often, 
by special request, in the handwriting of the teacher. 
Books were used for a long time. With all the glory of 
promotion to the First Room, only two new books ' 
were to be bought. The same geography, grammar, 
speller, and arithmetic were to serve for the two years 
before going to the high school. 

To carry these precious volumes a new article had 
recently been invented. The books were laid between 
two parallel pieces of wood with a strong cord run¬ 
ning through holes at either end and wound up by a 
little wheel and ratchet under the handle. The slight 
snap that the wheel made in catching was exceedingly 
agreeable to the ears of little schoolgirl owners. 

These carriers were not yet very common; but Ella 
had with considerable foresight and crocheting of 


AMONG THE WELL-BEHAVED ANGELS 133 

mittens prepared for the future; and now when all the 
boys and most of the girls marched into the First 
Room with jagged armfuls of books and slates, Ella, 
and two or three others carried only neatly screwed 
up carriers carefully packed with the largest books at 
the bottom and the smallest at the top, especially 
when the smallest was a new notebook slate. 

The principal sat on the platform, and as Ella went 
by, she gave him a friendly little smile which he found 
himself returning. The assistant was assigning seats. 
These were given out according to the rank of the 
pupil for the last quarter. Ella had been Number One, 
and so the place of honor, the seat in the farthest cor¬ 
ner from the front, was given to her. Alma sat beside 
her. Back of her was a wall, and on her right side was 
another wall. 

Alma was a quiet girl who studied hard, and Ella 
liked her; but Alma never whispered, not even if she 
had plenty of extras to spare, and, Ella feared, would 
not even “communicate.” The assistant had ex¬ 
plained what was meant by “communicating.” If 
you smiled at any one or nodded your head, or took up 
your deskmate’s pencil with a look that meant, “May 
I use this?” you were communicating. In short, you 
were expected to behave 44 as if you were entirely alone 
in the room,” said the assistant. 

Ella had meant to be very, very good in this new 
room, but expectations of such preternatural excel¬ 
lence alarmed her. She felt like a naughty little imp 


134 


ELLA 


dropped by mistake into a roomful of particularly 
well-behaved angels. Just then she looked up and 
caught sight of a vacant chair standing near the as¬ 
sistant’s place on the platform. That was where she 
had sat to do the examples that had admitted her to 
the Second Room. It was five months ago. None of 
the First Roomers had paid any attention to her. She 
was quite beneath them. And now she herself was a 
First Roomer. She was no longer a naughty little imp, 
she was one of the particularly well-behaved angels. 
She was twelve years old, and in two years she would 
go to the high school. She sat up very straight and 
arranged her books in her half of the desk with much 
dignity. 

Ella had supposed that the lessons would be harder 
in the First Room, and she was surprised to find 
that they were no more difficult than in the Second 
Room, though perhaps a little more accuracy was re¬ 
quired — if that was possible. 

The spelling lessons were always written. “People 
rarely spell words orally,” declared the principal. 
“Nine tenths of the time they write them. What is 
needed is the ability to spell correctly on paper, and 
to spell without the slightest hesitation.” 

The first step in this undertaking was to cut fools¬ 
cap paper into strips between two and three inches 
wide. This was done by the principal in primitive 
fashion, that is, with a jackknife and ruler. They 
were sold to the pupils at eight strips for a cent. When 


i 


AMONG THE WELL-BEHAVED ANGELS 135 


spelling was called, each child wrote her name at the 
top of a strip, dipped her pen into the ink, and squared 
for instant action. The assistant took her stand beside 
one of the swiftest writers of the class and gave out 
words selected from the lesson of the day, as rapidly 
as they could be written. Every word must be correct 
at the first writing. In the first place, there was no 
time to make any change. In the second place, the 
attempt was always discovered. Even a shower of 
little blots, carefully made to resemble the work of a 
spluttering pen, and incidentally to conceal a mistake, 
availed nothing. The papers were corrected by the 
pupils, and never was one allowed to pass with even 
an undotted i or an uncrossed t. 

% 

Straight through the spelling book the children 
went, reviewing over and over again what they had 
learned in the lower rooms, and adding to their knowl¬ 
edge by “advance lessons.” They learned columns of 
words in which ire , yre f ier , iar , igher , and uyer have 
the same sound; others in which c, d, and ch are silent; 
they learned words that hunt in couples, pronounced 
alike but spelled differently and ridiculously apart in 
meaning; and finally they learned some 1500 of those 
words of the English language that may be counted 
upon almost with certainty to produce a crop of fail¬ 
ures. 

Fifty words were written each day, and to win the 
longed for 100 per cent, every one of them must be 
above suspicion. There were examinations in spelling 


136 


ELLA 


of course, and as a kind of supertest, the class was one 
day required to write from dictation on the spur of 
the moment, the following sentence: 

It is an agreeable sight to witness the unparalleled em¬ 
barrassment of the harassed peddler, attempting to gauge 
the symmetry of an onion which a sibyl had peeled with 
a poniard, regardless of the innuendoes of the lilies of car- 
nelian hue. 

Pupils who ranked high were given in turn the 
charge of the report book. This was an honor, but 
also a great responsibility. There were no mistakes 
in that book, for every figure was watched. “I am 
keeping my own report very rigidly myself this term,” 
wrote Ella, “so as to see if there is any foul play.” 

Keeping the reports was not only a responsible but 
a complicated matter. To begin with, there were 
“whole failures” and “half failures.” A downright 
“I don’t know” was a whole failure. A slightly mud¬ 
dled recitation, not all wrong and not all right, was a 
half failure. Then, too, there were extras to be con¬ 
sidered and taken account of. Sometimes these were 
promised in advance, but generally they were given 
unexpectedly for some specially good piece of work. 
A particularly good map, an unusually clear recitation 
of some difficult point, sometimes won from one to 
ten extras. On one never-to-be-forgotten day, when 
there was a very hard lesson in grammar, the assist¬ 
ant gave to every one who did not fail ten good solid 
extras, thus deeply arousing the regret of those who 


AMONG THE WELL-BEHAVED ANGELS 137 


would have studied harder if they had guessed what 
she meant to do. 

Grammar was in the hands of the assistant, and it 
was whispered among awestruck children that the 
author of the grammar — author of a printed book! 
— had said that he wished he could teach his own 
book as well as she. Could there be greater glory? In 
the lower rooms, a smaller grammar was used; but on 
entering the Second Room this larger textbook came 
to its own, and was used every day for two years and a 
half. It never occurred to any one that the children 
might cease to be interested and that it would be 
better to make a change every little while. The 
grammar was there to be learned, and learned thor¬ 
oughly. 

When they came to the list of prepositions, Ella was 
appalled. She had never had the training of the lower 
grades in learning unrelated words, and to learn this 
list of sixty-four was much worse than lists of pro¬ 
ductions. She asked the assistant: 

“Why do we have to learn that list?” 

“So that you will recognize a preposition when you 
come to it.” 

“But I always do.” 

“How do you know one?” 

“Just the same way I know a kitten. If it behaves 
like a kitten, it is a kitten. If it behaves like a prep¬ 
osition, it is a preposition.” 

The assistant laughed. “It is true that you always 


138 


ELLA 


do know a preposition,” she said thoughtfully. “The 
others learned that list in the lower rooms, and with¬ 
out it I am afraid some of them would not know a 
preposition from a kitten. We’ll talk this over some 
day.” 

Ella wisely concluded that she need not learn the 
list, but that she must not tell any one of her privilege. 
Her experience at the seminary as a “faculty child” 
had taught her never to reveal faculty secrets, and 
this one was never told. The assistant did not men¬ 
tion the matter again, but Ella noticed that one day 
when the embarrassing question would naturally have 
fallen to her, it was given to some one else. 

One evening at the close of the first term in the 
First Room, Ella did some counting and measuring 
of paragraphs. Then she said: 

“Mother, we have been over only twenty-two 
pages this whole term. Of course there are exercises 
besides, but what we have really learned, if it was 
printed together solidly, would make only seven.” 

“I will speak to the assistant if you like,” said the 
mother, and ask her if she can arrange to give you 
longer lessons.” 

“Oh, no,” cried Ella in some alarm. “If the lessons 
were longer, there wouldn’t be any time to read and 
play and crochet and draw and go to see the other 
girls and have them come to see me. But I was just 
thinking how it would sound if I should get to be 
a famous woman some day and any one asked how 


AMONG THE WELL-BEHAVED ANGELS 139 


much grammar I used to do in a term, and you would 
have to say, ‘Seven pages.’ Then people would think 
I must have been horribly stupid.” 

“Don’t worry,” advised the mother with a smile. 
“Before you are a famous woman, there will be time 
enough to go over more pages. Just learn everything 
thoroughly. That’s all you have to do now.” 

“I do learn everything thoroughly,” declared Ella. 
“I have to, if I am going to stay at the head of the 
class — and I am,” she added with emphasis. “ Any¬ 
way, I like grammar. I don’t like learning rules, of 
course, and when I give an illustration that is just as 
good as the one in the book and a great deal more 
sensible, I don’t see why it should be called wrong. I 
recited, ‘The adverbial element may be an adverbial 
clause denoting time.’ The illustration was ‘While I 
was musing, the fire burned/ Now when you’re mus¬ 
ing, the fire doesn’t burn, it goes out, or at any rate it 
burns low; so I said, ‘While I was musing, the fire 
burned low.’ The sentence contained an adverbial 
clause, and it was good sense and the way fires be¬ 
have, and it sounded better; but it was counted half 
a failure. I don’t think that was fair; but I do like 
parsing and analyzing. It’s real fun to shake a sen¬ 
tence all to pieces till it has to tell you just what it 
means and what it didn’t intend you should ever 
know. It’s as much fun as any game. But when an 
illustration illustrates, it does illustrate. It’s right, 
and I don’t see how it could be any more right.” 


140 


ELLA 


“Perhaps when you become that famous woman, 
you can write a grammar that will keep every little 
girl at the head of the class and never allow any one 
to faiL ,, 

“But I don’t believe I’d care so much about being 
at the head if every one else was there. Do you think 
it’s selfish to want to be at the head?” 

“How should you feel if some other girl was always 
at the head? That’s the way to find out,” said the 
mother. 

“I suppose I shouldn’t like it,” Ella replied 
thoughtfully. “But I like the principal, and I have 
reason to think that he likes me, and he would be dis¬ 
appointed if I failed on purpose and went down. It 
would not be right to disappoint him, would it? ” 

“No,” said the mother, “it would be wrong not to 
do your best; but you must try just as hard to be kind 
to all the boys and girls as you do to stand at the 
head.” 

“There’s one boy who doesn’t like me,” said Ella 
meditatively, “and I never did a thing to him. He 
told the assistant to-day that I was drawing a picture. 
She told me to bring it to the desk. I was trying to 
copy the ‘Landing of the Pilgrims’ from our history. 
She looked at it, and then she said, ‘Ella has taken 
great pains with it, and it is very well done. Learn 
your lessons as well as she does, and you may 
draw, too. And remember that I do not like tale¬ 
bearing.’ ” 


AMONG THE WELL-BEHAVED ANGELS 141 


“ I hope you didn’t smile and look pleased when she 
said that.” 

“No, I didn’t — neither did the boy. I did make 
up a face, though,” she added a moment later. 

“Why, Ella!” 

“Oh, just in my mind, I mean. It didn’t do him 
any harm, and it made me feel a whole lot better.” 


CHAPTER XV 
ELLA AND THE PRINCIPAL 


Ella was right in thinking that the principal liked 
her. He was severe, often harsh. Sometimes he 
seemed to delight in making the children uncomfort¬ 
able, and even in punishing them. When he read the 
Bible in the opening exercises, he had a way of em¬ 
phasizing verses about liars and thieves that made 
his most truthful and honest pupils cringe and think 
that they must have said something that was false 
or done something dishonest. With a voice of scorn 
and utter contempt he would read, “I cannot dig; 
to beg I am ashamed,” and then apply the verses 
to those pupils who were too lazy to dig, but were not 
ashamed to beg their classmates for help. 

Ella was perhaps the one child in school who was 
not afraid of him. The only time that he had ever 
shown to her his liking to frighten and tantalize chil¬ 
dren was on the day when he had sent for her to come 
to his office; and that little interview had ended so 
happily that she always thought of it as a jest. Then, 
too, he had once known the dead father whose mem¬ 
ory she worshiped, and that was enough to win her 
heart. 

To this principal it was something new in all his 
years of teaching to find himself caring what any 
pupil thought of him; but it was a fact that when he 


ELLA AND THE PRINCIPAL 


143 


had made some harsh speech and then caught Ella’s 
look of surprise and regret, he felt uncomfortable. He 
would have been amazed if any one had said, “You 
are much more gentle and kindly because you want 
that child to think well of you,” but it was true never¬ 
theless. 

The arithmetic was his share of the teaching, and 
he conducted it by methods that were successful cer¬ 
tainly, but never used in any other school in the city. 
He was quite likely to break into a rather lame ex¬ 
planation of a problem by handing the one who was 
reciting a foot-rule and saying, “Go and measure 
those steps across the street and find out how many 
square feet of boards are in them”; or, “There’s a pile 
of wood in the next yard. Go and find out how many 
cords there are.” Once when he thought a class 
needed waking up, he suddenly asked, “What would 
happen if an irresistible force should meet an im¬ 
movable body?” Again he demanded, “Why can’t a 
man lift himself up by his bootstraps?” Another 
time he sent a boy for a wooden rolling hoop. When 
it arrived, he held it firmly to the chalk ledge of the 
blackboard, and marked one point on the hoop where 
it touched the ledge and another exactly opposite that 
one. Then he turned the hoop a little and demanded, 
“Why does the point at the top move over more 
distance than the opposite point at the bottom? You 
can see that the whole hoop is moving, can’t you? 
Why don’t they keep together?” 


144 


ELLA 


There would be reasons why it did and why it 
didn’t, until when he thought the class were thor¬ 
oughly waked up, he would turn back to the lesson 
and go on as if there had been no interruption. He 
was as fond of cube root as if it had been a pet child 
of his own, and when Ella’s class came to that cor¬ 
ner of the arithmetic, he took it almost as a personal 
grievance that they complained of the difficulty. 

“You try to do it without thinking,” he declared 
wrathfully. “If you have just three minutes in which 
to do something new, take two of them to think out 
what is the best and quickest way to do it. Cube root 
is the finest thing in the arithmetic. Miss Ella doesn’t 
groan over it,” he added, “and you ought to be able 
to do it as well as she.” 

“Ella’s done it before,” said a boy. “She did it be¬ 
fore she ever came to this school. She said so.” 

The principal’s fine little speech was spoiled. Prob¬ 
ably he had never come so near being angry with her. 
When the class was over, he called her to the desk. 
“Miss Ella — Ella,” he said, “you must always re¬ 
member that there are some things which it is better 
not to tell.” 

m 

He had quite a liking for making his pupils turn 
teachers. Sometimes he would say to a boy or girl in 
the middle of a recitation, “You may take the class 
now”; and he would sit back restfully in his big chair 
on the platform with his eyes half closed. 

It was an honor to be asked to hear a class, but it 



ELLA AND THE PRINCIPAL 


145 


was hardly a pleasure, for the gentleman in the chair 
was not so sleepy as he seemed, and woe to the sub¬ 
stitute teacher if he allowed the slightest mistake to 
pass. 

Sometimes when the teacher of a lower room was 
absent, he would send one of the First Roomers in to 
take her place. 

“Tell them,” he would say, “to multiply 1 by 2; 
that product by 3; that by 4; and so on until they 
have multiplied by 26. Then let every one who has it 
right go home.” 

“Will you please give me the right answer?” the 
young substitute teacher would ask, and he would 
reply with apparent indifference, 

“Oh, I haven’t it. You can do it while the others 
are at work” — not an especially easy thing for a 
child of twelve to do, particularly as he knew well that 
the principal would look in every little while to make 
sure that everything was going on in orderly fashion. 

Hearing one another’s lessons was common, and 
correcting one another’s papers; but Ella had an ex¬ 
perience in teaching that went far beyond this. One 
day the principal called her and said, 

“Miss Ella — Ella — there’s a boy in the office who 
says he never understood why you invert the divisor. 
I want you to go in and explain it to him.” 

In a minute Ella came back and said, 

“There is a man in there, but there isn’t any boy.” 

“Well, boy — man — it is all the same. Just go 


140 


ELLA 


back and explain it to him as if he was a small boy.” 

Ella’s seminary experiences came in play. She 
had been so used to being counted with grown-ups 
when she was a member of the “Literary and Scien¬ 
tific Course” that she did not feel the least bit em¬ 
barrassed or awkward, but explained and cut up an 
apple to illustrate as easily and naturally as if the 
strange man had been the boy whom she was expect¬ 
ing to find. 

“Did he understand?” asked the principal when 
she returned to the schoolroom. 

“He said he did,” Ella replied. 

“I should think he did,” the principal said to Ella’s 
mother afterwards. “He has been teaching — you 
can guess how well — somewhere in the backwoods, 
and he is trying to learn a little something before he 
goes back. He said he never understood before why 
you invert the divisor, but I think he will always re¬ 
member now.” 

Most of the work in the First Room was merely a 
continuation of that in the Second, but there were 
two new books to be bought and two entirely new 
subjects to be taken up. One of these new subjects 
was the writing of compositions. This was the dread 
of the whole class. 

“I don’t see why you should dread that,” said the 
mother. “You liked to write your ‘Little Pearls’ 
when you were only eight years old; and you and Boy 
Cousin had a fine time writing the ‘Bearcamp Books.* 


ELLA AND THE PRINCIPAL 


147 


I have seen you spend half an evening over ‘ Parker’s 
Aids to Composition.’ You liked that.” 

“Yes,” replied Ella thoughtfully, “but I picked out 
from Parker’s just what I liked to do. There were 
sentences with a word left out, and there were sen¬ 
tences where one word was used till I was tired of it. 
It was just like a puzzle in a paper to make those 
right; it was play. And when Boy Cousin and I wrote 
the ‘Bearcamp Books,’ we only wrote the things that 
came into our own heads. The girls in the First Class 
say that in school compositions we have to write the 
things that come into other people’s heads.” 

“And you don’t know how to get them out?” said 
the mother with a smile. “Wait till your first subject 
is given you, and perhaps it won’t be so bad as you 
think.” 

“The First Class had to write last year on ‘The 
Seasons,’ ‘Taste and Fashion,’ ‘Books of Value,’ 
‘Art and Artists,’ ‘What costs nothing is worth noth¬ 
ing ’; and I am sure as sure that I haven’t a word to 
say about those,” said Ella dolefully. 

When the first subject was given, it proved to be 
“Printing.” Ella tried her best to produce what she 
thought was in grown-people’s minds about it. She 
read the articles on printing in two encyclopaedias, 
and then she set to work. After many struggles she 
wrote: 

The honour of inventing printing is usually given to 
Gutenberg. Scarcely anything is known of his life until 


148 


ELLA 


the age of thirty-six, when he entered into a contract with 
a certain company, promising to impart to them what¬ 
ever knowledge he possessed concerning the secret of print¬ 
ing. The company probably intended to commence the 
practice of this art, but their plans were frustrated by the 
death of one of the leading members of the association. 

So Ella wrote, primly and stiffly, as she imagined 
grown-ups always did when they wrote for one an¬ 
other. She even spelled the familiar “honor” with a 
u , because it had a u in the encyclopedia, and she 
supposed it ought to have one in a composition. 

She struggled with that composition with an energy 
worthy of a better result; and when it was returned, 
the world seemed hollow as she read, “ Spelling, 5 off,” 
and saw that the guilty cause of her loss was that 
word “honour.” Farther down the page, however, 
there was a comforting little note, “10 extras for the 
expressions being your own.” Her own, indeed! 

One of the two new books bought for use in the 
First Room was a Sixth Reader. Remembering that 
the date of its publication was 1866, one can almost 
name the articles of prose and poetry of which it con¬ 
sisted. Compiled at the close of the Civil War and 
only fourscore years after the American Revolution, 
there was of course much about union and freedom 
and independence. There was the eloquence of Web¬ 
ster and the “Gettysburg speech” of Lincoln; there 
was “Sheridan’s Ride” and “The Ride of Paul 
Revere,” and “The Antiquity of Freedom.” 

The United States was young and strong, and in 


ELLA AND THE PRINCIPAL 


149 


natural reaction reading books for children, as well as 
volumes of selections for older folk, contained many 
articles about death. In the Sixth Reader was the 
gruesome tale of Ginevra, who in sport hid in a great 
chest on her wedding day and was suffocated therein, 
her body not being found till many years afterwards; 
there was the “Death of Little Nell,” “Over the 
River,” “The Conqueror’s Grave,” the “Burial of 
Sir John Moore,” the story of the Indian who was 
swept over Niagara Falls, and an especially vivid 
account of the horrors of the French Revolution. 
Against all the theories of pedagogy, such thoughts as 
these were chosen to put into youthful minds — and 
did them not one bit of harm. The country was all 
a-thrill with energy, and here in the children’s reader 
was much of meditative prose and poetry, “The Old 
Clock on the Stair,” the “Address to a Mummy,” 
Byron’s “Apostrophe to the Ocean,” Collins’s “Ode 
to the Passions,” and Gray’s “Elegy in a Country 
Churchyard” — and the strange part of it all was 
that the children actually enjoyed these serious 
writings. 

No one, least of all the children themselves, ever 
demanded entertaining stories in the reading class or 
a frequent change of readers any more than they 
demanded interesting examples in arithmetic or a 
change in the spelling of words or in the multiplica¬ 
tion table. The same selections were read over and 
over, but no one seemed bored by the repetition. The 


150 


ELLA 


secret was that when the reader was taken in hand, no 
one expected to be amused. Every one realized that 
there was some definite work to do. What the au¬ 
thor meant must be discovered. Then one after an¬ 
other was called on to read the same paragraph or 
stanza until the teacher was satisfied that the thought 
had been fully brought out. The selections in the 
reader were carefully chosen to give scope to thought 
and expression. To read well was regarded as an 
accomplishment. The best reader in the room was 
looked upon with envy and admiration. Visitors often 
asked if they might hear a class in reading. 

As has been said, when the reader was taken in 
hand, every one in the class realized that there was 
work to be done; but of course not all succeeded 
equally well in doing it. One pupil declared his belief 
that a “storied urn” meant an urn “that you could 
tell a lot of stories about.” Another demanded with 
emphasis, 

“And how can man die better 
Than facing fearful odes?” 

and yet another, coming to 

“Yet my last thought is England’s — fly! 

To Dacre bear my signet ring,” 

read in defiance of both sense and punctuation, 

“Yet my last thought is England’s fly.” 

It was a long time before he ceased to bear the nick¬ 
name of “England’s fly.” 


CHAPTER XVI 

WHEN THE COMMITTEE MEN CAME 

The second new book that was purchased in honor of 
the First Room was a history of the United States. 
This was quite a grown-up history with its three hun¬ 
dred pages besides the Declaration of Independence 
and the Constitution. There were maps and pictures. 
There were even detailed maps of many battles. There 
were “chronological reviews,” which consisted of long 
lists of dates, each with its proper event attached. 
They were recited at express train speed as follows: 

1607. Jamestown was founded. 

1609. Hudson discovered the Hudson River. 

1610. The starving time. 

1619. The first legislative assembly in America was con¬ 
vened in Virginia. 

The book was not interesting, but it was well 
written. Ella’s heart was won by the first sentence. 
This read, “The honor of the discovery of America be¬ 
longs to Christopher Columbus as an individual, and 
to Spain as a nation.” The swing, the balance of the 
words pleased her. She did not know whether it was 
good or bad, but she did know that she liked it and 
liked to say it over and over. 

The first draft of her composition on “Printing” 
read, “The honor of inventing printing belongs to 


1 52 


ELLA 


Gutenberg as an individual and to Germany as a na¬ 
tion.” But she decided that it was not quite fair to 
borrow the sound of a whole sentence from some one 
else; so she compromised by taking half of it. 

At the end of the second day’s use of the book, she 
came home quite in despair. 

“I just can’t do it,” she lamented. “I thought it 
was nice, for it told about Columbus when he was a 
boy, and about his trying so hard to get some rich 
king to help him find the way to India by sailing 
across the Atlantic. The assistant said she did not 
want us to learn it word for word, and I didn’t. I told 
it just as I would a story; and I left out that he studied 
geometry; and it was counted a half failure. I don’t 
see why any one could not cross the ocean without 
studying geometry; and I haven’t the least idea what 
geometry is, anyway.” 

The history went on with struggles and unhappi¬ 
ness, for it was never easy for Ella to learn anything 
word for word, and she found that while this was 
neither required nor desired, it was nevertheless the 
only way to make sure of bringing in every detail, and 
thus avoiding failures and half failures. 

Through discoveries and colonies and Indian wars 
she toiled and part way through the Revolutionary 
War. Then one day a little girl with bright eyes and 
glowing cheeks threw open the door of her home and 
cried: 

“I can do it now, mother. They never seemed like 


WHEN THE COMMITTEE MEN CAME 153 


real people, but they do now, and some of them are 
buried in our own cemetery. I found one just now 
that said, ‘Fell at Bunker Hill.* 

This was rather confused, but little by little the 
mother understood the situation. An old Revolution¬ 
ary cemetery lay in the heart of the city, and through 
it ran the nearest way to school. The city authorities 
would have been glad to get rid of it and took no care 
of the place, made no repairs, and did not object to its 
being used as a playground. Most of the stone wall 
around it had tumbled down. Monuments were lying 
on the ground, the door of a tomb had been shattered; 
but yet it was beautiful, for flowers grew everywhere. 
Under the trees were white stars of Bethlehem. Vio¬ 
lets, daisies, and buttercups were scattered through 
the grass. Shady lots were covered with periwinkle, 
and sunny ones were bright and cheery with trim 
little none-so-pretties. Lilacs, white roses, red roses, 
and yellow Harrison roses peered through the broken 
palings of the fences. Lilies of the valley ran in 
friendly fashion from one lot to another. In spite of 
the neglect, or perhaps because of it, the old cemetery 
was a happy place for children, and they enjoyed it. 
On the way home it had suddenly entered Ella’s head 
to compare the dates on the stones with those in her 
history; and in a flash the whole story became real. 
She had found not only the grave of one who was 
killed at Bunker Hill, but of one who had been with 
John Paul Jones in battle on the sea. From that day, 


154 


ELLA 


history was as real to Ella as the things she could 
remember in her own life. 

She told Alma about her discovery. 

“Do you believe we ought to play here,” said Alma, 
“now that they seem like real living people?” 

But Ella had not forgotten her fancy that the dead 
folk of the little churchyard in the mountains liked to 
have people come there to eat their Sunday lunch and 
chat a little together. She remembered too one day 
when her father and mother and she were walking in a 
cemetery. She was a tiny child and she began to play 
on one of the graves. The mother called her away, 
but the father said, “ Oh, let her play. I think if I were 
there, I should like to have little children come and 
play around my grave.” 

She said to Alma rather shyly, 

“I think maybe they'd like to have us.” 

“Perhaps they would,” said Alma, “if we played 
gently and had kind thoughts about them.” 

“Of course we should play gently,” said Ella. 
“We’re not small children any longer. We shall go to 
the high school in one year more. Oh, I want to go 
now. I want to be grown up. Don’t you?” 

“I don’t know. Perhaps. Why do you want to?” 

“One reason is so I can go up in the Fourth of July 
balloon. I’ve always wanted to, and I will if I ever 
have five dollars that I can spend just as I like. I sup¬ 
pose I shan’t ever ride in a swanboat, for I’m too old. 
But let’s go on with the history lesson. Perhaps we’ll 


WHEN THE COMMITTEE MEN CAME 155 


find that some of the people in it are here. If they are, 
let’s pick some flowers and put on their graves.” 

With this new inspiration the children roamed 
about the old cemetery, examining dates and inscrip¬ 
tions. 

“Here’s one marked ‘Howe,’” said Ella, “and it 
says that he died in battle in 1778.” 

“Maybe he was related to Admiral Howe,” Alma 
suggested. 

“How he must have felt, then, to have his own un¬ 
cle — I guess he was an uncle — fighting against the 
Americans,” said Ella. “Suppose it had been Wash¬ 
ington who died in 1778?” she added thoughtfully. 

“Then maybe we’d be under a king or a queen. 
How queer it would be to talk about ‘Her Majesty 
the Queen of Great Britain and the United States of 
America.’ ” 

“I don’t believe we’d be under a queen at all. 
Something would have been sure to happen.” 

Both the little girls looked forward with pleasure to 
the recitation in history on the following day, but 
they were disappointed, for just before the class was 
to be called, visitors came in and asked especially if 
they might hear one of the classes in reading. 

There were of course more visitors to the First 
Room than to the lower grades. One was the superin¬ 
tendent of schools. He used to drop in informally, 
chat a little in a friendly fashion, and then, when the 
boys and girls were quite at their ease, he would ex- 


156 


ELLA 


amine a class or two, look at the maps that had been 
drawn, make a note, both aloud and in his notebook, 
of anything that he especially liked, and say good¬ 
bye quite as if he had been visiting at their homes. 

Members of the school committee had the privilege 
of making speeches to the pupils. If a man could win 
a place on this committee, he could, even if he had no 
talent for public speaking, enjoy all the rewards of 
eloquence, for he was sure of an audience who would 
hang upon his words and whose faces would express 
genuine regret when his speech was evidently drawing 
to a close. 

It was Ella who let the secret out. Once after there 
had been an address that was both long and dull, the 
assistant said to her at recess: 

“I was pleased to see how attentive you were to 
our visitor this morning. That was real courtesy.” 

“I wanted him to keep on talking,” Ella replied. 

“Did you?” questioned the assistant, with a note 
of surprise that would slip into her voice, quite against 
her intentions. 

“Yes, because if he had talked only ten minutes 
longer, it would have been too late to have any geog¬ 
raphy recitation, and I didn’t know the lesson so very 
well,” replied Ella serenely. “I tried to look just as 
interested as I possibly could, so he would keep on 
talking.” 

Even if the committee men were not all the most 
eloquent of public speakers, they rarely failed to have 


WHEN THE COMMITTEE MEN CAME 157 


something definite to say and to say it in a way that 
would make it “stick,” which after all is about as 
much as any orator can hope to accomplish. One of 
them brought a stranger with him one day, who asked 
to see the drawing of maps on the blackboard from 
memory. 

“Very well,” said the principal. “Class in geogra¬ 
phy. — What is your State?” he asked the guest. 

“Georgia,” the guest replied. 

“The class may put an outline of Georgia on the 
board,” said the principal. “North — northeast — 
east — southwest. Put in the ranges of mountains.” 
Six rivers were drawn in and the location of six towns 
marked. It was done too rapidly for even a glance at 
a neighbor’s map, and with few mistakes. 

When the maps were done, the guest spoke highly 
of the work, the accuracy and the speed manifested. 
“It was quite a coincidence,” he said, “that their 
lesson should have been my own State.” 

“Their lesson was on Southern Asia,” said the prin¬ 
cipal quietly, “ but what they have once learned, they 
are responsible for at any moment. Will you say a 
few words to the pupils?” he asked the committee 
man, for that was the courtesy demanded by the 
occasion. 

The committee man rose rather ponderously and 
looked the room over. Then he said: 

“You’ve studied about the equator, of course; and 
now I want to know what a ship does when it comes 


158 


ELLA 


to the equator. Does it sail over it, or break through 
it, or what?” 

No one said a word. The duller pupils were a little 
shy. The brighter ones were afraid of some catch, and 
there was silence. The committee man looked up and 
down the class. Finally, he pointed his long finger to 
the farthest corner of the room and said: 

“I’d like that boy with red hair to answer the 
question.” 

The boy with red hair was sensitive about bright 
colors. His face turned scarlet while the rest of the 
class giggled. 

“I want that boy with red hair to answer,” re¬ 
peated the committee man. “I’ve noticed that when 
a boy has red hair, he usually has some pretty good 
brains under it.” 

The laugh was turned. The boy with red hair now 
plucked up courage and said, “The equator is an im¬ 
aginary line. There is nothing to get over.” 

“Good,” said the committee man. “You are the 
kind of boy I thought you were. Now, don’t forget 
that the equator isn’t the only difficulty in the world 
that you will find to be imaginary when you come to 
it. Good-bye.” 

Another visitor told interesting stories about the 
little red schoolhouse that he attended as a boy, about 
getting out of bed before light cold winter mornings to 
help with the farm work before he went to school; of 
ploughing his way through snowdrifts, of making hay 


WHEN THE COMMITTEE MEN CAME 159 


and digging potatoes and threshing grain, of working 
all day in the hot sun. 

“Now, boys,” he said at the close, “I have a secret 
to tell you. You think it’s rather hard — don’t you? 
— to be called at eight o’clock in the morning, eat 
breakfast, and get to school by nine? Well, the secret 
is that while you are making yourselves comfortable 
the country boys are making themselves ready to 
come here to the city a few years from now to take 
your places. I wonder what you are going to do about 
it. You want those good places, and there is just one 
way by which you can hold on to them. It is this, 
‘Work hard and don’t grumble.’” 

Another committee man talked about perseverance. 
At the end of his little address he said: 

“We have been talking about perseverance, and 
now I am going to ask you to do something that will 
make you remember this talk as long as you live. I 
want you to sing ‘Go on, go on, go on, go on,’ to the 
tune of ‘Auld Lang Syne.’” 

It was sung, and there is no question that it was 
remembered. 


CHAPTER XVII 
THE HIGH SCHOOL EXAMINATIONS 


One day at the beginning of Ella’s second year in the 
First Room, the superintendent came to the school 
and brought with him a stranger, a quiet gentleman 
with a pleasant smile. 

“Do you suppose that is the one?” was the question 
signaled from one to another. 

Three days of the term had passed, and the princi¬ 
pal had not appeared. All sorts of rumors were float¬ 
ing about. It was said that he had leave of absence, 
that he was sick, and finally, that he had resigned and 
that a new principal might step in at any moment. 
The assistant was quite equal to the management of 
the school, and everything was going on well. 

The superintendent introduced the stranger to her; 
then, turning toward the pupils, he introduced to 
them their new principal. Fortunately it was near the 
close of the session, for no rules against “communicat¬ 
ing” or even whispering could have long suppressed 
the comparing of notes that was all ready to burst 
forth. There was no playing on the homeward way 
that noon; the children were too eager to tell the great 
news. 

Ella was an ardent little partisan. Whatever the 
principal was to others, he had always been kind to 


THE HIGH SCHOOL EXAMINATIONS 161 


her, and she wrote forlornly in her little diary, “An¬ 
other king arose which knew not Joseph.” 

Of course some different ways of doing things were 
introduced, and Ella was certain that the older ways 
were far better. In arithmetic, it had been forbidden 
to preserve any written work. What was wanted was 
the ability to do a problem; why preserve it then, if 
you have the ability to do it at any time? The new 
way was to keep your problems in a blank book, each 
one fenced off from the others by a carefully ruled 
double line, and have them to refer to at any moment. 
There were good reasons for both ways. 

The plan of map-drawing had been to study a map 
till you had a picture of it in your mind, then to draw 
that picture on paper or on the blackboard. The new 
way was to make as nearly an outline of the country 
to be drawn as could be made with straight lines, and 
then fit the true outline of the country around it. 
This worked very well if one happened to remember 
just how many “measures” long each line of the out¬ 
line should be; but if the proper length of any one line 
was forgotten, the pupil was all at sea. The numbers 
had gone from his mind, and he had no mental picture 
of the map. Ella's diary called it “a queer, conglom¬ 
erated way of drawing Europe.” 

Gradually the new principal made his way. Every 
lesson had to be learned as carefully as ever, but there 
was a margin to the work. When strange kinds of 
woods appeared in the list of “productions” that was 


162 


ELLA 


the children’s horror, the new principal was quite 
likely to bring some specimens of them to school, and 
perhaps to invite a group of those children who 
seemed most interested to spend the evening at his 
house to see the rest of his cabinet of woods. With 
him a company went not only to the asbestus ledge, 
but to a coal mine not far away where they could col¬ 
lect some fossils. He had a valuable microscope, and 
this he brought to school to reveal the marvels of 
little things. 

So passed the spring term. In those days the spring 
term began the school year, so that when Ella re¬ 
turned to school in September, she had only three 
terms more before going to the high school. 

It was soon plain that much of the rest of the year 
would be given to preparation for the high school 
examinations. Every study was reviewed most thor¬ 
oughly, from the beginning of the book to the end. 
For a while geography was recited twice a day, once 
to the new principal and once to the assistant. Every 
question in the little pink geographical question book 
was asked by the teacher and answered by the pupils. 
The principal exports of Europe, fifty-three articles, 
were recited over and over. A table of the latitude 
and longitude of fifty-six places, a thing to give one 
bad dreams, was repeated in chorus and in solo. More 
than once the time sacred to the reading class was 
given to going over the LTnited States or some other 
country, naming boundaries, rivers, and cities. Maps 


THE HIGH SCHOOL EXAMINATIONS 163 


were drawn until the children could almost have 
drawn them with their eyes shut. The new principal 
said it was never his way to offer prizes; but if it had 
been, he would have offered one long ago for the best 
map of Europe. “Draw just as good a map as you 
can,” he said to the First Class, “and we will see 
about the prizes afterwards.” 

The other studies were reviewed in much the same 
way as the geography. There was more teaching 
than the teachers could do, and some of the pupils 
were pressed into the service. Ella hardly recited 
at all, she was so busy hearing others. Among 
these were two girls who were sent to her in the office 
every day. “See if you can possibly make them 
understand how to analyze a sentence,” said the 
assistant almost hopelessly. 

There were written examinations without end. 
Surely the children ought to have been well used to 
them, for they lived and breathed examinations every 
few days, especially in grammar and arithmetic. 
Among these examinations were full sets of the ques¬ 
tions used for entrance to the high school for the last 
twelve years, and every one of these was given to the 
class in hand. The children of the sixties must have 
been tough little things, for not one of them had 
nervous prostration. 

As the weeks passed on, the work became more 
and more intense. Every question in the geographical 
question book had been answered, as has been said. 


164 


ELLA 


Every topic in history was recited and every map 
of a battle reviewed. “Miscellaneous Problems ” from 
numerous arithmetics were now showered upon the 
children’s heads like avalanches. Weird and incred¬ 
ible tales these problems were, tales of men who 
bought goods on the most impossible terms and sold 
them in fractional lots of most uncomfortable size; 
tales of a group of men who bought a grindstone in 
partnership and left to the members of the First Class 
the task of finding out how many inches each should 
grind off to get his money’s worth. Did any one ever 
work on that problem without a mental vow never, 
never to buy a share in a partnership grindstone, 
especially well in toward the center? 

The rules of the grammar were thoroughly reviewed 
and then came a great expanse of opportunity for 
parsing and analyzing. On pages and pages of the 
Sixth Reader difficult words were underlined for pars¬ 
ing. The most complicated sentences were carefully 
dissected, and incidentally a habit of looking closely 
into the exact meaning of words and the precise shade 
of thought which they expressed was formed. The 
study of grammar was much more than a repetition 
of rules. It had a wide and generous margin. It took 
the place in the grammar school that is filled by logic 
in the college. 

In spelling, the knowledge of one book was all that 
was required. Indeed, there was once quite a little 
insurrection when, in one of the test examinations. 


THE HIGH SCHOOL EXAMINATIONS 165 


the word “pusillanimous” appeared, a word which 
was not in the spelling book. About music there was 
grave questioning. Many of the pupils were taking 
lessons at home, and some were doing quite advanced 
work. Was it fair to compare this with the work of 
children whose only instruction came from an hour 
a week in school? “There will always be a difference 
in home advantages,” said the wise superintendent, 
“but these examinations should be limited to what 
they have had full opportunity to learn in school.” 
It was decided that the examination in music should 
be given, but should not be counted in ranking the 
pupils. 

This matter of rank was of vast importance in the 
eyes of the children, and was watched with interest by 
some thousands of the older folk of the city. The high 
school examinations were not given in the grammar 
schools, but in the high school — which gave to them 
an added dignity. The papers were corrected with the 
utmost care and were then ranked according to their 
percentage. The city was proud of her schools, and 
to stand Number One in these examinations was 
looked upon as being the highest honor that it could 
bestow upon a pupil entering the high school. 

This was Ella’s ambition. “I want it! I want it! 
I want it!” she said to herself. “It seems as if I must 
have it.” But would she get it? Ever since the first 
half-term she had been at the head of her class. She 
had become used to this, and had fallen into the habit 


166 


ELLA 


of writing carelessly in her diary, “Reports to-day. I 
was Number One as usual,” and then had forgotten 
it all and had crocheted a mitten or played ball with¬ 
out thinking any more about it. This, however, was 
quite different. Her work was to be compared with 
that of the pupils of the First Class in all the gram¬ 
mar schools of the city. It is no wonder that she 
was anxious. 

The last day of school arrived. Ella went through 
the exercises almost in a dream. She began to realize 
that she was going into a strange new school, and she 
was half afraid. After the day was over and the guests 
had gone, the whole class wrote their names on the 
board with “Graduating Class of 1869. Good-bye.” 

On the following morning a long procession of boys 
and girls wound its way up the hill to the high school. 
They were distributed among the different rooms. 
Each room was in charge of a teacher, and Ella was 
delighted to find the assistant standing by the door 
in her room, ready to welcome her. The place of 
honor was given to arithmetic; first written, then 
mental arithmetic. It was “mental” indeed, for not 
one figure was allowed to be written. The pupils did 
the examples in their minds as best they could, then 
set down the answer; and they had had so much prac¬ 
tice in keeping the example as well as the work in 
mind that it seemed to them hardly more than play 
when a good clear printed copy of the questions lay 
before them. 


THE HIGH SCHOOL EXAMINATIONS 167 


What the nerves of the children of 1869 were made 
of is a mystery, but sure it is that after graduating 
from the grammar school on Tuesday, going through 
part of the high school examinations on Wednesday, 
Ella, and probably many others, went to a party 
Wednesday evening, and on Thursday finished the 
examinations — geography, grammar, spelling, his¬ 
tory, and music. Thursday afternoon there was a 
visitor for Ella to take shopping. The visitor went 
home at night, and now there was time to think. Ella 
began to be a little alarmed. She thought over one of 
her answers after another, and wondered whether she 
had by mistake slipped in a wrong word or figure. 
“I must be head of the city,” she said to herself. “I 
want it! I want it! Oh, I want it! I do so wish the 
principal would come and tell me.” 

The doorbell rang; the principal had come. 

“Oh, I’m so glad!” Ella cried. “Do please tell me 
where I stand!” 

“You know it takes some time to look over all 
those papers,” said the principal kindly, “but I will 
see that you know the results just as soon as possible. 
I came about the map. Have you forgotten about 
the map for which a prize was to be given?” 

She had not forgotten, but prizes for maps seemed 
a very small matter to her now, and it really required 
a little effort to thank the principal as warmly as she 
thought he would expect. After he had gone, she 
opened the package rather indifferently. It contained 


168 


ELLA 


a handsome copy of iEsop’s Fables. With its corners 
put into slits in the flyleaf was a card with her name 
and the date. She laid the book down, and wandered 
restlessly about the room. “Did you notice how 
queerly he looked at me?” she said to her mother. 
“He knows that some one else is ahead of me, and 
that is why he wouldn’t come in. He was very good 
to bring the book, but I don’t care one bit for it or 
for anything in it.” She took up the book indifferently 
and began to turn the leaves over; and behold, with 
the corners put into slits in a second flyleaf was an¬ 
other card, and on it was written, “Ella, 94 per cent 
average. Highest in the city.” 

One day Ella heard the bell of the grammar school 
ringing faintly across the old cemetery, and she went 
down the path between the graves of the Revolu¬ 
tionary heroes to visit the school. The principal and 
the assistant gave her a warm welcome and a seat on 
the platform just as if she was a committee man. 
The pupils looked at her enviously, just as she used 
to look at the high school girls when they came back 
to visit. The big waste-basket stood near her. On 
top of the scraps of paper was a half-sheet, and on it 
was written a line or two in the “Tories’ Alphabet.” 
She wondered which of these children were “ best 
friends” and had been admitted to the secret. New 
maps were on the board, not hers nor those of any of 
her class. A girl whom she had not especially liked 
was sitting in her old seat. A class from the Second 



ON IT WAS WRITTEN, “ ELLA, 94 PER CENT AVERAGE. 

HIGHEST IN THE CITY” 






































THE HIGH SCHOOL EXAMINATIONS 169 


Room had been promoted, and how young they did 
look! They were just babies! 

“Aren’t those children from the Second Room a 
great deal younger than we were when we came in?” 
she asked. 

The assistant smiled. She had heard that question 
before. 

“Just the same average age,” she replied; “but you 
know that you have grown up. You are not a little 
girl any longer; you are a young lady of the high 
school.” 

There was a lump in Ella’s throat. Something had 
gone out of her life. She was not “in it” any more — 
and “it” was her vanished childhood. 


THE END 




, 








APPENDIX 


THE EXAMINATION QUESTIONS OF 1869 
Mental Arithmetic 

1. i of a number exceeds i of it by 20. What is the 
number? 

2. A can do a piece of work in If hours: A and B can 
do the same work in 48 minutes; in what time can B 
do it alone? 

S.i+i+i-f-iofa certain number, increased by 
3f + lOf = 5Of. What is the number? 

4. When gold sells at 59 per cent advance, how much can 
be bought for $100 in bank bills? 

5. What must be the amount of my sales for one year 
that I may clear $800, at 16 per cent profit? 

6. An attorney collects a bill and receives for his services 
$1.26, which is -J- per cent of the amount of the bill. 
What was the value of the bill? 

7. If cloth is a yard and a quarter wide, and shrinks 6 per 
cent in length and 6 per cent in width, what part of a 
square yard will one yard of the cloth contain after 
shrinkage? 

8. Bought paper at $1.75 per ream and sold it at 1 cent a 
sheet. How much per cent did I gain? 

9. If gunpowder is composed of nitre, charcoal, and sul¬ 
phur in the proportion of 7.6, 1.4, and 1, how much 
of each article will it take to make 2500 lbs. of gun¬ 
powder? 

10. A and B had the same income. A saved i of his, but 
B spent $30 a year more than A; and at the end of 8 
years, found himself $40 in debt. How much did each 
spend yearly? 


172 


APPENDIX 


Written Arithmetic 

5 8 1 31 2^ 

1. What is the value of - of —| of — + 

2. If 1 gal. 1 qt. 2 gi. of water passes through a filter in 
one hour, how much will pass through in 4 h. 20 m. 
24 sec.? 

3. Sold goods for 2^ per cent commission and invested 
my commission in sugar, which I sold at an advance of 
15 per cent, and gained $240. How much was my com¬ 
mission, and what was the value of the goods sold? 

4. If I invest $3500 for 1 year, 2 months, and receive on 
my investment a dividend of $490, what rate do I re¬ 
ceive per year? 

5. A cubic inch of earth weighing 220 grains, consists of 
41 billions of infusoria. What is the weight of one 
insect? 

6 . If a man can earn $2 T V per day, how many days* 
wages will he have to give for a suit of clothes, if the 
coat costs $25 J, the pantaloons $ 8 / 1 , and the vest 
$5i? 

7. If a man buys bank stock at 35 per cent above par, 
what per cent does he receive on his investment if the 
bank pays 8 per cent on the par value of the stock? 

8. What will be the length of a straight walk between the 
opposite corners of a rectangle whose length is 40 rods, 
and width 36 rods? 

9. A, B, and C joined their capital in the proportion of 
i, h i. At the end of 9 months they divided their 
profits, amounting to $2860. How much did each 
receive? 

IjO. How much money should you receive from a bank for 
a note of $820 for 90 days, discounted at 8 per cent? 

Grammar 

1. Write the plural of baby , belief, journey , potato , pros - 


APPENDIX 


173 


pectus, sheep, wife ; and the feminine nouns corre¬ 
sponding to actor, bridegroom, ^eiV. 

2. Compare able, beautiful, c/we/, /ree, like. 

3. Write the possessive case, singular and plural, of deer, 
goose, it, lady, man. 

4. State the mood, tense, and voice of the following 
verbs: I am struck. He is reading. Dost thou sleep? 
He will have been thinking. Do not run. 

5. Write a sentence containing a transitive verb with an 
object, and change the sentence to one expressing the 
same thought with the proper forms of the same words, 
with the verb in the passive voice. 

6. Comprise in a single sentence an adjective element of 
the third class, a complex objective element of the 
first class, and a complex adverbial element of the 
second class. 

7. Analyze the following sentence: “ ‘ All’s well that ends 
well,’ is a familiar proverb.” 

Parse the words in italics in the following sentences: — 

8. That is true. It is seen that that “that” stands first in 
the sentence. 

9. It is difficult to decide what to do under circumstances 
so unusual as these. 

10. Correct the following sentences: It has been talked 
over between you, John and I. The cause of these 
quarrels are unknown. I ain’t got none. You daresn’t 
do it. What had I ought to do? 

Geography 

1. Name the rivers in America, beginning on the North¬ 
east, that flow into the Atlantic. 

2. Draw a map of Maryland, with its rivers and princi¬ 
pal towns. 

3. What does Central America comprise? 

4 . What are the principal exports of South America? 

5. What are the principal towns in England? 

6. What are the principal towns in Scotland? 


174 


APPENDIX 


7. What are the principal towns in France? 

8. What are the principal seaports in Spain? 

9. What are the principal towns in Austria? 

10. Describe the route and the waters a steamer would 
pass through in going from New York to Manilla. 

History 

1. Give an account of the discoveries of the Cabots. 

2. Give an account of the settlement of Salem. 

3. Give an account of the causes of the French and In¬ 
dian War. 

4. Give an account of the First Continental Congress. 

5. Give an account of the Evacuation of Boston. 

6. Describe the Battle of Camden. 

7. Give the names of the most important events of 1781. 

8. State the causes of the Civil War. 

9. Describe Sherman’s March. 

10. Describe Lee’s Surrender. 

Music 

1. Describe a diatonic scale, stating how many notes it 
contains; how many tones and semi-tones; the order 
of these tones and semi-tones, and give the scientific 
reason why No. 8 agrees with No. 1. 

2. Give the signatures of the keys of Mi, Fa, Si, and La 
flat. 

3. Write out eight notes, beginning with Mi flat, and flat 
the notes where necessary. 

4. What is a chromatic scale? 


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